Find It On The Internet

Search Engines, Metasearch Sites, Indexes, and Libraries

There are hundreds of search engines, crawlers, bots, spiders, indexes, directories, and search sites on the Internet. Some have lasted for years, like Yahoo and Google. Some, like Infoseek, had promise but disappeared. It is impossible to have a totally accurate listing of search sites. A few years ago I found a German search site called "Site Shack" and within a few weeks of linking to it, it vanished. Metasearch sites are useful because the site will search many engines and indexes simultaneously and quickly. Metaseach site from time to time change the search engines they use. Indexes and Libraries are like reference librarians, they put the information in categories for you making it easier to find what you are looking for. Many of these sites are evolving into "portals." Portals are starting points on the Internet. They have search capabilities and provide a variety of other services, such as free web based email, chat, message boards, news, weather, stock reports, and free space for web sites. Most times you can customize the site to focus on your interests and have your own personal "start page". Portals seek to be your starting place so that you will come back often. The greater the number of visitors to a site, the greater the advertising revenue.

Years ago, the most popular engines were HotBot, which also has an index, and AltaVista. Google is now one of the most popular and profitable and is excellent at finding specific web sites. Fast Search, based in Norway, claims to be the world's largest search engine. GoodSearch uses the Yahoo search engine, but when you use it, money is donated to participating charities. WiseNut is another search engine.

Popular indexes and directories are Yahoo, Excite, Go, Webcrawler, Lycos, MSN Search, Thunderstone, LookSmart, and eiNET. About.com is an index with human web guides, each seeking out and providing information and sites on specific areas. Formerly known as the "Mining Company." Good Search is powered by Yahoo and when you use it to search, money is contributed to nonprofits.


One of my favorite metasearch sites is Dogpile. Here you can search many web engines/indexes simultaneously. You can also search usenet, FTP, and news wires. A similar excellent metasearch site is Vivisimo. Other metasearch sites are Veoda, MetaCrawler, Search.Com, WebMetasearch, Metasearch, Highway 61, Mother of All Search Engines, Mama Health for medical searches, Zapmeta, MetaGopher, All 4 One Search Machine, Proteus, webtaxi.com, OneSeek, Vroosh, SuperSeek, MultiCrawl, ixquick and C4 (See For) (formerly Cyber 411). searchthe.net allows you to search 18 search engines individually using javascript. The Info.Com, by Mark Chackerian, has a general metasearch site as well as metasearches in specialized topics, such as music and books. Cluster Searching is a similar concept. A cluster search site searches a number of search engines and then clusters the search results in categories. Kartoo, Mooter, iBoogie, Ujiko, and Clusty are interesting examples, each with a different way of clustering.

There are search engines and indexes based all over the world. A European search engine is EuroSeek , and European Search Engines, Directories and Lists is an index of European search engines. There is First Find in Germany. The Indian subcontinent has a search engine and index at 123 India Search Engine. Gateway Japan and Goo are indices for Japan. Woyaa is African, Anzwers Search Center covers Australia and New Zealand, Canada.com is Canadian, and Radar UOL is Brazilian. Even if the site is in a language other than English, you can often enter English words into the search box and get results. Apollo7 is a German metasearch engine site, and An Experiment In Web Indexing (AEIWI) is from Denmark.

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Links to other search sites, lists of search sites, and indexes:

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Libraries

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Stan Rockwell
stanrockwell@hotmail.com

Copyright © 1997-2007 Stan Rockwell - This page last updated on February 25. 2007
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