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.
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
- Ask.com - general search engine enhanced by a number of specialty searches including a dictionary, thesaurus, currency converter, encyclopedia, maps, news and more
- 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. Also check out Bing Maps.
- Blekko - retrieves results from trustworthy sites and offers filtered searching with the use of slash tags, e.g., global warming /climate; can sort results by relevance or date; allows searchers to integrate their Facebook newsfeed into search results
- ChaCha - offers live human guides to help answer queries; accepts queries from mobile devices
- DuckDuckGo - offers results from content-rich sites, displays "zero-click" answers at the top of the search result page, and features numerous search options and site settings; offers unusual search privacy
- 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 retrieves results in real time as you type your search. 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 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 types of information sources, including "credible " sites recommended by librarians
- 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
- SearchTeam - real-time collaborative search engine that allows you to search, save results, and collaborate with invited others; you can comment, chat, share documents and links, etc. to create a useful SearchSpace on any topic; integrates with such social networks as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter
- SnappyFingers - searches millions of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) for answers to user queries
- 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
- Zanran - searches for data and statistics found in graphs, tables and charts; hover your mouse over the item icon for a preview
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
- Cacti Search - search Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask, and retrive a collated results list with an option to view results from each engine separately
- 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
- Mamma - retrieve results from numerous sources; also offers search suggestions related to your search
- MetaCrawler - retrieve results from Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask; also offers search suggestions related to your search
- Searchzooka - offers advanced search options on Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask, Digg and Technorati with a single mouse click; users can save searches for future use, organize the searches into folders, and clone new searches from existing ones
- SortFix - conduct a search, then drag suggested search terms into a box to add to your search; also drag terms to remove them from your search or do a dictionary definition lookup; searches Google, Bing and Bing Images, Twitter and YouTube
- 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
- 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
See also: Searchenginesindex.com, a collection of search engines from around the world.
