Individual Search Engines
- A9 - Amazon product that offers search results from Google along with a number of additional features, including search results from Amazon's "Search Inside the Book;" A9 also saves your search history and tracks the click history of sites you have viewed from your search results
- Accumo - organizes a small number of results from Google into concept clusters; also offers the fee-based Accumo Classifier software for desktop use
- Alexa Web Search - returns results powered by Google with additional information including traffic ranking, number of links to page, ownership and links to related pages of interest
- AllTheWeb - returns results quickly from an extremely large database gathered by the Yahoo crawler; offers multimedia and news searches; has a good advanced search interface
- AltaVista - searches Web sites and Usenet newsgroups with advanced Boolean and field search options. See also:
- AOL Search - engine that defaults to AND logic and offers an Options template for easy search construction; has an option to view results by popularity; offers a directory based on the Open Directory
- Ask.com - general search engine enhanced by a number of specialty searches including a dictionary, thesaurus, currency converter, encyclopedia, maps, news and more (Site is a merging of the former search engines Ask Jeeves and Teoma)
- BananaSlug - uses the Google search mechanism and seeds your search with a random word from the category of your choice to return unusual results
- Brainboost - ask questions in plain English and retrieve pages with the relevant answer
- Exalead - offers concept clustering of results, thumbnail images of retrieved sites, and customization options such as organization of results by file type, geography or modification date
- Factbites - beta engine that searches for full topic matches and returns meaningful, full sentence excerpts of sites in its results list
- Google - ranks pages by tracking the links links from pages ranked high by the service. Google offers a number of Services that are worth exploring, including:
- Google Blog Search, for searching blog entries
- Google Book Search, for searching the full text of books from most publishers in the U.S.
- Google Directory, for searching the Google version of the Open Directory
- Google Scholar, offers the full text, abstracts, and/or citations to scholarly materials including books, journal articles, documents in academic repositories and the free Web. This link will allow you to access the full text of articles in journals to which the Libraries subscribe when you are off campus.
- Google Search: Unclesam, a searchable database of U.S. government Web sites (.gov and .mil) ranked by link popularity
- HotBot - offers easy form-based Boolean, field, and media search options; includes its channel content with the results for searches on broad or popular terms; clusters results by presenting one hit per site
- IceRocket - offers thumbnail images of retrieved sites; also saves a search history, creates an RSS feed of search results, and offers a free RSS builder
- Lycos - emphasizes search results from the Open Directory and offers Web sites from the FAST Search index
- MSN Search - Microsoft's search engine that offers searches of the general Web as well as some deep Web sources; includes a Search Builder that includes an option to retrieve results based on recent updates, popularity and exact or approximate match. This tool will eventually be replaced by Windows Live Search.
- RLIN AMC database - the RLIN Archival and Manuscripts Control database
- SearchEdu.com - service that limits results to the .edu, domain; also offers to search well-known dictionaries, encyclopedias, almanacs, etc. See also:
- Thunderstone Website Index - search thousands of sites (vs. Web pages) from a continuously updated database
- Ujiko - features a number of results customization tools in a visual environment that also offers topic classification for subsequent searches
- WISEnut - offers a large database and a companion directory of topics related to a search
Meta Search Engines
- AllinOne MetaSearch - search multiple search engines simultaneously and retrieve results organized into concept clusters
- Cacti Search - search Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask, and retrive a collated results list with an option to view results from each engine separately
- Chubba - search the Web, a dictionary/thesaurus and encyclopedia
- Clusty - tool from the creators of Vivisimo that clusters results from a variety of surface and deep Web sources and organizes them into clusters by topic, site or URL; also offers a variety of customization options
- Copernic - client software that searches multiple engines and directories, removes duplicates and dead links, highlights search terms in your results, and offers a variety of search and retrieval options
- Don Busca - searches the Web, blogs, news and software and offers a variety of options with each result including concept clusters, a visual thumbnail of the site, a cached version, a link to the site archive in the Wayback Machine, site info from a variety of sources and various bookmark management options
- Dogpile - search 20+ search engines and retrieve results by relevance or separate source engine; also presents concept clusters for viewing results organized by keywords or topics
- Fazzle - searches several search services on the Web, and also offers specialty searches of downloads, images, video and other topics on the deep Web
- GenieKnows - searches 25+ engines and directories and ranks results based on the number of sources listing a page; chooses sources to search based on consumer input; also offers searches of multimedia types
- iBoogie - offers searches of the Web and multimedia, and supplies real-time concept clustering of results
- InfoGrid - offers meta and news searching; portal interface also features the Open Directory, topical InfoGrids, with additional customization of topics available in a free download
- Infonetware - categorizes search results into component subtopics with options to select multiple topics for a new set of topics and a filtered results list
- Ixquick - ranks results based on top ten rankings from the source sites; allows any type of search syntax and will translate and direct your search accordingly
- Kartoo - categorizes content into relevant concepts and sites and displays results on a graphical map; requires Flash or offers an HTML version
- KillerInfo - retrieves information from the general Web and various topic-specific sources and organizes results into concept clusters based on Vivisimo's technology
- Mamma - retrieve results in relevancy ranked order; power search offers a user-friendly template for building a query
- MetaCrawler - retrieve results in relevancy ranked order; useful power search available with a template of search options
- metaEUREKA - sorts results by relevancy and offers a "Site info" link that returns information on the server, date last modified, size, and descriptive information if available; also links to site history via the Wayback Machine and popularity ratings from Alexa
- Mooter - meta engine that presents initial search results in graphical format and organizes results into concept clusters
- Pandia Search Central - searches multiple engines and directories and also offers searches of news, books, music, videos and other specialty databases; includes a searchable version of the Open Directory
- SurfWax - offers options to see a quick view of sites in the search results list to determine relevancy and choose alternative search terms for a subsequent search from a thesaurus; offers personalization options; offers SurfWax LookAhead with "Dynamic Search Navigation" that retrieves results from RSS feeds as you type various kinds of queries
- Trexy - beta engine that tracks "trails" of the Web pages visited and therefore valued by other searchers
- Turbo10 - retrieves results from multiple sources, including the deep Web, and offers sorting by speed and relevance; also offers concept clusters to organize results into keywords and subtopics
- Virtual Learning Resources Center - searches several high quality directories; also offers its own directory
- Vivisimo - searches multiple engines and directories and organizes results into topical categories
- Yooci - metasearch tool that retrieves no more than 250 results for any search
- ZapMeta - organizes results by relevance, popularity, title, source or domain, allows users to set preferences, and features a useful advanced search interface
Search Engine Collections
[Many also include directories]
- Beaucoup - compilation of 2000+ engines and directories organized by category; also offers a meta search capability
- EZ-Fund - search 12 search engines individually from the same site
- SearchBug.com - offers searches organized by topic, and searching of single or multiple search services
- Search Engine Colossus - directory of hundreds of search tools from more than 200 countries around the world
- Search Engine Guide - topical collection of 3000+ engines, directories and portals
- SearchIQ - categorized collection of engines and directories from the SearchIQ search engine informational site
Specialty Search Engines
Deep Web
The so-called "deep" or "invisible" Web consists of content stored in searchable databases mounted on the Web. These databases usually cover a targeted topic or aspect of a topic. Search engine spiders cannot or will not index this information. There is a huge number of searchable databases on the Web, many available as specialized searches on general search engines. The following is a site devoted to searches of multiple databases on the Web.
- CompletePlanet - offers searchable access to thousands of databases on the "deep Web" for results that include summaries from the retrieved site
Domain Names
- Checkdomain.com - search for the availability of a domain name in nearly every country of the world
- Clickey - search for words contained in a domain name, or keywords contained in a brief record, with options to limit searches to a country, state and city
- Registry Whois Search - search the database of registered domain names on the site of Network Solutions, the company that registers many domain names
- Whois Finder - domain search service that supports most top-level domains
FTP Search Tools
- FileIndexer.com - offers searches by file name, file type and size from a collection of sites that are added daily
- Ftpsearchengines.com - "file finding portal" listing FTP sites on the Web
- Oth Net - searches multiple FTP sites by keyword
Multimedia & Images
- AltaVista Image Finder - searchable collection of multimedia on the Web: search by media type: images, videos or audios
- The Amazing Picture Machine - searchable collection of a variety of image types including architecture, animals, maps, artwork, world leaders and more
- Ditto - offers searches for images by word or phrase
- FindSounds.com - searchable collection of sounds and sound effects on the Web, with options to hear similar sounds, and to search for sounds by mono/stereo, resolution, sample rate and file size
- Picsearch - offers image searching by word and phrase; also offers and advanced search for animations/non-animations, color/black & white, and size
- Singingfish - searches streaming content including music, movies, news, radio, sports, television and finance
- TimePix - commercial site offering free access to more than 22 million photos, prints and illustrations taken from popular Time-Life magazines and the historical Mansell photograph collection; registration required
- Yahoo! News Image Gallery - presents current news photos and a searchable directory of archived news photos
New Page Tracking
- Google Alert - free e-mail alert service to save a search and have it run regularly against new pages on Google
- Karnak - searches hundreds of Web sites, stores the results online, and e-mails you notification of the results; premium fee-based service tracks additional queries and offers customization options
- TracerLock - saves your search query and tracks AltaVista for pages matching your search terms; the first ten results are sent to you in an e-mail
