The Big List of Search Engines
General Web Search Engines
If all you know are Google, Yahoo and Bing you might be surprised to learn there are many, many more search engines on the Web. Check out the list!
Altavista was the first well known search engine for the Web and that's about the only thing it's known for. Today it's mentioned mainly for it's role in history. The search results are from Yahoo so don't expect anything original here, still it can bring a nice dose of nostalgia to those of us who remember the time when Yahoo was just a free directory and Google didn't exist. Altavista
Ask, formerly known as Ask Jeeves, is one of the small but big search engines with a 3.9% market shart as of November 2009. Ask was one of the first search engines to mix it's search results with other sources like encyclopedias, images and maps. A simple query test indicates that Ask has billions of pages, or 1/8th of those in Google, at least for Enlish language results. Ask.com
Bing is Microsoft's latest facelift on the search engine that was first named MSN Search, then Live Search and now Bing. Bing is considered by most to take the third spot after Google and Yahoo in terms of search quality. It's also third in search as far as market share is concerned. Bing
Blekko is a brand new Google killer as they like to call themselves. It's run by Rich Skrenta, previously on Topix and Netscape's Open Directory. It's not live yet but is supposed to launch in the end of 2009, let's see if it does… Blekko
Clusty calls itself a clustering search engine. This basically means that in addition to the traditional list of search results it gives you a list of alternative topics that your search phrase could be related to. I don't like the quality of search results, though, there's a fair bit of low relevancy results returned. Clusty
Cuil is a new search engine that markets itself as the world's biggest search engine with three times the pages indexed as Google. It made a big bang when it launched in 2008 by crashing on launch day (LOL), but gives fairly good results and presents them in a new, somewhat strange, way. Cuil
Dogpile is a meta search engine that combines the search results of Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask to let you search from all the big search engines in one place. Despite a minimal market share Dogpile has still managed to get several J.D. Power & Associates awards for best customer satisfaction, this according to Businessweek. Dogpile
DuckDuckGo, founded by Gabriel Weinberg, is a search engine with it's own bot and index, but it also uses data from other sources, like Yahoo BOSS. Despite it's funny name, DuckDuckGo provides compelling search results that is a combination of facts, disambiguations and links. DuckDuckGo
Entireweb is a search engine founded in 2000 by the Swedish company WorldLight.com AB. Currently they index several hundred million webpages and serve over 100 million searches per month. Entireweb
Excite was founded in 1994 by Graham Spencer, Joe Kraus, Mark Van Haren, Ryan McIntyre, Ben Lutch and Martin Reinfried, all students at Stanford. Over the years it has been through the dot-com bubble, mergers, aquisitions and bankruptcy. Today it's a meta search engine and portal with search results from Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask through an arrangement with InfoSpace. Excite
Gigablast was founded in 2000 by Matt Wells. It has a large, frequently updated index and gets to play with the big boys though it doesn't have much of a market share in search. The search results in a quick test is not up to the same standard as Google and Yahoo. Gigablast
Google is the world's most popular search engine. Cuil said they have a bigger index but it's going to take years before anyone can knock big G down from the position as market leader. Google
Hakia is a semantic search engine that organizes the results into categories looking at the search term from different angles. It uses a database of sites recommended by librarians to provide credible results, it then adds web results where the credible sources do not have enough info. It blends all this with news, photos and social media feeds to make it a different search experience. Hakia
ImHalal is a search engine mainly for Muslims and includes web, image and Quran search. It returns highly relevant results quickly and looks nice so I included it here with the others. ImHalal
Leapfish combines the results from Google, Wikipedia, Digg, wikiHow, Answers, Amazon and Twitter to make an information page about your search term combining the media from many services. It looks neat enough to include on the search engine list even if they don't have their own index. Leapfish
Lycos, which began as a research project by Dr. Michael Loren Mauldin of Carnegie Mellon University in 1994, grew to become the most visited online destination in the world in 1999. After several years of decline the search market share of Lycos was at 0.01% by the end of 2008, but if you visit them you'll see that they still deliver relevant results with thumbnails attached. Lycos
Omgili is a forum search engine that only returns forum threads in the results. I tried a couple of searches and it's really useful. I get to see what people are talking about, which sometimes is just what I want. Omgili
Secret Search Engine Labs was started in 2007 as a hobby project by Simon Byholm and is aiming at providing highly relevant search results with a really small index size. Secret Search Engine Labs
Spezify is a totally cool new search engine that, instead of the normal search result listings, provides a flash based view that looks like you had pinned newspaper clips and photos to a board. You can see and read a whole paragraph of text from the website which makes it a lot more easy, at least for me, to decide which page I want to visit to learn more. Spezify
WayBackMachine lets you search old versions of webpages, sometimes all the way back to 1996. It's fun to look up old versions of popular websites to see how they've changed through the years. WayBackMachine
Yahoo! Search is the eternal runner up, always trailing big G with good search results and a significantly smaller share of the search market. Yahoo has a lot of portal features in addition to search, which sets it apart from Google in many ways. Yahoo Search
Some Search Engines that traditionally appear in many search engine lists have been left out as I feel they provide little value. Usually this is because they use the data from another engine, the're not Enlish language or they simply return low quality results.
These search engines use the Entireweb datafeed: ExactSeek, WebFerret, ixquick, mamma, slingpage, searchmirror, findtarget, Zoeken, Search66, Findelio, AtomicSeek, aesop, Kart00, eTools, ZUULA, Citosearch, Atnio, unabet, iZito, zapmeta, InfoGrid, VINDEN.NL and FlexFinder
These are the others: All The Web, AOL, Baidu, Comcast, HotBot, Mamma, MetaCrawler, mywebsearch, WebCrawler, WebFetch, Yandex
Blog Search Engines
Blog search engines finds blog posts and usually favor recent posts as blogs are often about news and you want to get the latest news. Blog search engines are also often real-time as the pinging system and RSS feed of a blog makes it a lot easier for the search engine to fetch content as it is created.
Bloglines is a blog search engine and news aggregator that was founded in 2003 by Mark Fletcher, former CEO of ONElist. In addition to searching through millions of blog posts you can also combine news (RSS) feeds to have all your online information collected in one place. Bloglines
Google Blog Search is the blog search engine by Google. It finds a lot of relevant answers to a query and feels comfortable to use. Google Blog Search
Social Search Engines and Other Weird Stuff
Hunch is a decision enging that asks you fun questions to learn what type of person you are. With some questions answered it will use it's knowledge of your interests and social associations to give you answers tailored to your personality. I think it's quite fun, but I'm not sure if it's useful.. Hunch
Mahalo is a questions and answers type portal much like Yahoo Answers, you can type in any question and other users can answer them. You can earn Mahalo dollars if you provide the best answer to a question. Mahalo
Powerset is a natural language search engine that tries to understand the question asked instead of just looking for keywords. Powerset was founded by Barney Pell, a graduate of Stanford with a Ph.D in computer science from Cambridge, aquired by Microsoft in 2008, and it currently searches and organizes articles from the Wikipedia. Powerset
Aardvark is a social engine where users can ask their friends and contacts for advice. The software automatically directs the question to the persons best eqipped to answer based on the personal profile they have entered into the system. Sounds like a good idea and they have an offer from Google to buy them for $30 million. Aardvark
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January 4th, 2010 at 7:57 pm
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