Beaucoup - a list of 2500 search engines including many foreign ones.
A short list of some of the more useful and powerful search engines available
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Beaucoup - a list of 2500 search engines including many foreign ones.
Infomine Scholarly Internet Resource Collections
Resource Discovery Network high quality internet resources for the learning, teaching and research community
CompletePlanet The Deep Web Directory 70,000 + searchable databases
Invisible Web 10,000 databases of information as diverse as ATM machine locations, song lyrics or cooking ingredient substitutes.
AltaVista, a former heavy weight champion, is first in the list only because it begins with A. It was sold again in February 2003 to Overture, a pay-for-placement service. Overture auctions placement in search results to advertisers; good for them lousy for you. AltaVista was revamped in 2002 to include a useful Image, Audio & Video search. Another wonderful feature is the foreign language translator which translates (English to and from: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Japanese and Chinese and Russian to English and German to and from French). Enter a URL and the whole web page will be translated. Use the special features, but for regular searches first try other engines or a metasearch engine like Ixquick or Vivisimo.)
Answers.com delivers encyclopedia like results rather than links. It is a reference search service with content from encyclopedias, dictionaries glossaries and atlases. Excellent for quick information on a topic
ASK.com Searching for highly authoritative web pages, Ask uses the Teoma (expert in Gaelic) Engine which ranks a site based on the number of same-subject pages that reference it. Results are grouped by subject and as a listing. A suggested refinements section helps to focus your search. Under the suggested refinements are resource pages containing site summaries.
Ditto.com is a visual search engine. Search for photographs and other images across the internet. There are some annoying pop up ads on this page but it seems to return a good selection of images quickly in the form of thumbnails.
Exalead is a promising new search engine that has many advanced features for powerful searching. Click on the "Advanced Search" button and you will be able to modify your search terms with "must contain", must not contain" and "preferably contains". It also offers a phoenetic spelling option (great for high school students who have trouble correctly concatenating the letters of the English language). Other features you can turn on include truncation searching, e.g. searching for teach also finds teacher and teaching, and proximity searching where one term is within a certain number of words of another (currently fixed at 16). This is still a work in progress, but it has great promise.
FOTOSEARCH is a commercial site for images, but, as was pointed out to me, you don't have to use the images. You could just view them. At upwards of $400 per picture students are unlikely to be dropping these into a presentation. Good for browsing though.
It's hard to imagine some things being any better: the DC-3, college in the 60's, Torvell & Dean. Google, however, continues to add features that improve this "best search engine". Google and Google's Advanced Search are designed to find the most relevant Web pages. This is the search engine by which all others are judged. Start with Google and you probably won't have to go anywhere else.
Google has several links just above the search entry box plus a "more" link. They vary from time to time and have included:
Web for regular internet text searches.Type define:yourword in the search box. Or add the dictionarysearch extension to Firefox to enable right clicking for a definition.Images search is as good for images as the regular Google is for text.
Maps lets you see a map or a satellite view of most locations in the United States. You can also get directions, business locations and contact information. Try typing in your zipcode. The pan and zoom features are amazing. Also see the Rumsey ancient map overlays. Also try Google Earth, a free download for satellite and arial images.
News puts related news stories from 4000 sources during the last 30 days in the same search grouping.
Shopping is a shopping robot that harnesses Google's powerful search capabilities to find the lowest prices for any item on the web. Use it in conjunction with the number range operator .. to search for a range of prices.
GMail A free but ad support web mail client.
Discontinued direct links are still available by clicking on More:
Local searches the area near you for businesses. Instead of a town you can use a zip code. Under the "more" tab are these options and more:
Catalogs pictures of complete catalogs, more than clog your mail box, more varieties than you imagined.
Directory is a Yahoo-like web directory where you can pick an area and bore down to the subject you want.
Google Labs all the cool new features under development.
Maps lets you see a map or a satellite view of most locations in the United States. You can also get directions, business locations and contact information. Try typing in your zipcode. The pan and zoom features are amazing. Also see the Rumsey ancient map overlays.
Print allows for full text searching of selected books.
Groups for usernet discussion groups.
New features being tested are
A metasearch engine that applies your search query to 14 search engines. Ixquick lets you search for MP3 files, photos, and news from six sources in plain English or with Boolean operators. Comprehensive results with few redundancies.
A search engine with an attitude. Ms. Dewey is entertaining but the search results are slow and all but unreadable. Even so if you have Flash Player installed you'll go back again to show her to your friends. She is part of a Microsoft awareness campaign and Microsoft provides the search results through Windows Live Search. It's certainly not going to overtake Google. It is a small step to counter the Apple vs. PC commercials.
PreFound is a human-indexed search engine. They describe themselves as "the ultimate Search Community site."
Search.com searches "Yahoo, Direct Hit, Lycos, Inktomi, Goto.com and 700 other search engines." They also metasearch specialized engines from around the web.
Vivisimo is another metasearch engine that clusters listings in folders. A clean design along with options for configuring the page view (only in Internet Explorer) make this new tool worth looking at. They also have a toolbar for Firefox called improbably, Clusty.
Polar Rose does face regognition with any phota posted to any web site.
Pandora will build a list of like artists from your starting list.
Consumer electronic devices fron Retrevo will give you information about your device categorized by manufacturer documentation, reviews and posts.
Abondance, search engines in French. Also see their main page.
Search through a million PDF files at Adobe PDF Search.
Google has added a directory listing.
Lycos is a directory, as is Yahoo, but with a less cluttered front page. The advanced search features are more powerful than Yahoo's.
Yahoo - useful for drilling down by subjects, preferred by many new users. Yahoo selects only about 5% of the web for inclusion in its directory. However it is a very good 5%.
Some Power Searching tips.
Deep Planets' Guide to Effective Searching of the Internet
A technical paper from Degreetutor entitled The Librarian's Ultimate Guide to Search Engines
Some basics of the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT and NEAR.
What do other people search for? Try Google Zeitgeist