Search Engines 

Individual Search Engines | Meta Search Engines  
Search Engine Collections

Visit How to Choose a Search Engine or Directory, a more extensive list of search tools organized by features.

To keep up with the world of new search engines, visit the blog Alt Search Engines.

Individual Search Engines

• Alexa Web Search - returns results from its own index accompanied by 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 Babel Fish, the AltaVista translation service.
• 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
• ChaCha - search engine that offers live human guides to help answer queries
• Cuil  - searches a very large index of Web pages and includes thumbnails of sites in its search results
• 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. Also check outEcoSmartSearch.com, a Google-powered search engine with a black background display that saves energy.

Google offers a number of Services that are worth exploring, including:

o        Google Blog Search, for searching blog entries

o        Google Book Search, for searching the full text of books from most publishers in the U.S.

o        Google Directory, for searching the Google version of the Open Directory

o        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.

o        Google U.S. Government Search, a searchable database of U.S. government Web sites (.gov and .mil) ranked by link popularity

o        Searchmash Google's experimental general search tool

• Hakia - accepts plain English queries; derives results from the Ask.com index
• IceRocket - offers searches of the Web, blogs, and other sources, creates an RSS feed of search results, tracks search terms cited in blog postings, and offers a free RSS builder
• iSEEK Education  - offers authoritative resources from university, government, and established noncommercial providers; organizes results into concept clusters, and also allows users to recommend and rate sites
• KoolTorch - returns results organized by graphical icons into general category clusters that, in turn, generate results within that category
• Live Search - Microsoft's search engine that offers searches of the general Web as well as some deep Web sources and focused search including health, local, and questions/answers
• Lycos - general search engine that also offers searches of a few deep Web content sources including people look-up, yellow pages and multimedia
• Quintura - displays a type of tag cloud with keywords related to your search that can be selected to generate new results
• SearchEdu.com - service that limits results to the .edu, domain; also offers to search well-known dictionaries, encyclopedias, almanacs, etc. See also:

o        SearchGov.com - .gov domain

o        SearchMil.com - .mil domain

• Ujiko - features a number of results customization tools in a visual environment that also offers topic classification for subsequent searches
• Webbrain - offers results in visual layout of related terms for subsequent searching
• Yahoo! - portal with a general Web search and many other content services

Meta Search Engines

• 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, including the creation of a Clusty Cloud
• 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
• Fasteagle  - Recommended! Offers searches of many types of Web sites, including the deep Web and the social Web
• Fazzle - searches several search services on the Web, and also offers specialty searches of downloads, images, video and other topics on the deep Web
• Findelio - searches a handful of popular engines and includes a list of related searches along with each set of results
• FindForward - searches multiple sources and offers numerous search options including chat search, tags, wildcard and grow word search
• 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
• Intelways - offers a search of multiple search engines, content providers and media types with access to results sets from the individual sources
• 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
• Keotag - type a keyword or phrase and retrieve results from the past 30 days of blog postings from numerous blog aggregators; you can subscribe to an RSS feed to track this search
• 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
• Mnemomap - provides results in a graphical format that provides search refinements and draws results from Yahoo!, Flickr and YouTube
• Monster Crawler  - simultaneously searches Google, Yahoo!, LiveSearch and Ask
• 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
• Slurk - searches Google, Yahoo and MSN, and gives keyword search suggestions and immediate results as you type
• Sproose - allows users to comment on and vote on its search results
• 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 - tracks "trails" of the Web pages visited and therefore valued by other searchers; users can Add Engine to extend the range of the search engines that Trexy uses
• URL.com - returns the top ten results from Google, Yahoo! and MSN, and allows users to comment on and vote on the results
• Virtual Learning Resources Center - searches several high quality directories; also offers its own directory
• WhoNu - semantic tool that searches a large number of resource types, including deep Web sources, and suggests alterate topics
• 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
• Zuula - searches the Web, images, news, blogs and jobs postings, and returns results from multiple search tools in configurable separate tabs

Search Engine Collections

[Many also include directories]

• 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