Search Engines

General Search Engines | Meta Search Engines

Visit How to Choose a Search Tool,
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.

General Search Engines

Alexa Web Search - analyzes site traffic including ranking, global users, pages linking to the site, and links to related pages of interest
AllTheWeb - returns results quickly from a database gathered by the Yahoo! crawler; offers multimedia and news searches; has a good advanced search interface
AltaVista - searches Web sites 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
BananaSlug - uses the Google search mechanism and seeds your search with a random word from the category of your choice to return unusual results
Bing - Microsoft engine that displays excerpts from sites retrieved by your search and offers related search suggestions; multimedia and other deep Web results are also displayed. Bing focuses on searches related to making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition, and finding a local business. Also check out Bing Maps Beta.
ChaCha - search engine that offers live human guides to help answer queries; also accepts questions from mobile devices
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 - searches for full topic matches and returns meaningful, full sentence excerpts of sites in its results list
Google - Web's most popular search engine that uses PageRank and other methods to rank results. Also check out EcoSmartSearch.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:
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 U.S. Government Search, a searchable database of U.S. government Web sites (.gov and .mil) ranked by link popularity
Hakia - organizes results into a variety of categories, including "credible sites" recommended by librarians; 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
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:
SearchGov.com - .gov domain
SearchMil.com - .mil domain
SnappyFingers - searches millions of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) for answers to user queries
Sproose - searches Yahoo! and allows users to comment on and vote on its search results
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
Wolfram|Alpha - enter a question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and own collection of data to compute the answer
Yahoo! - portal with a general Web search and many other content services

Meta Search Engines

43 Marks - offers separate searches of Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Wikipedia with a one-click toggle between search results; also serves as a personal home page for collecting bookmarks
Browsys - offers Search Assistant for searching numerous sources including the social and the deep Web; Virtual Folders allow users to create, save and bookmark custom folders containing up to 12 favorite sites
Cacti Search - search Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask, and retrive a collated results list with an option to view results from each engine separately
Clusty - 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
Dogpile - search numerous search engines and presented collated results; also presents concept clusters for viewing results organized by keywords or topics
iBoogie - offers searches of the Web and multimedia, and supplies real-time concept clustering of results
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 select your results from the general Web and the past 30 days of blog postings from numerous blog aggregators; you can subscribe to an RSS feed to track this search or create an OMPL file with your tag from all feeds
Mamma - retrieve results from numerous sources; also offers search suggestions related to your search
MetaCrawler - retrieve results from four major search engines; also offers search suggestions related to your search
Monster Crawler - simultaneously searches Google, Yahoo!, LiveSearch and Ask; offers suggestions for related searches
Own Mine - searches major search engines and offers the option to chat with users conducting similar searches
Searchzooka - offers advanced search options on Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask, Digg, Technorati, and Delicious with a single mouse click; users can save searches for future use, organize the searches into folders, and clone new searches from existing ones
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
ZapMeta - searches a handful of sources, and offers concept clusters for organizing search results
Zuula - searches the Web, images, news, blogs and jobs postings, and returns results from multiple search tools in configurable separate tabs