In the world of online search engines, most people stop with
the Big Three. Google, Bing and Yahoo! Search are indisputably the most widely
used. For those who like to run off the beaten path or march to the beat of
their own search engine, here are ten alternatives to consider the next time
you need to find information online.
- AltaVista – In operation since
1995, AltaVista is one of the web’s search trailblazers, and is still in
operation today. For those of us who were around in the wild days of the
internet’s infancy, the fact that the familiar name is still an existing
entity might come as a surprise. Though they retained the name and url,
AltaVista search was acquired by Yahoo! in 2003.
- WebCrawler – If searching the
Big Three individually just won’t do, spin all of them into one search
with WebCrawler. With a single-query system that uses metasearch
technology to trawl most of the major-player engines in one go, you’ll
also find multimedia results and local news.
- DuckDuckGo – DuckDuckGo is a
pared-down approach to web searching, offering prompts for disambiguation
and a zero-click feature that plops information in an easy-to-spot red box
above the link results and a no-tracking policy for the privacy-minded
user.
- Ask – Once known as AskJeeves, Ask.com
is another longtime player in the online world. A unique approach to
results grouping and simple presentation make Ask a standout.
- MetaCrawler – Taking its name
from the metasearch technology that allows a single-query search of
several indexed engines, MetaCrawler’s popularity peaked in the late 90′s,
but the site is still in use and relatively popular today.
- Mahalo – Though the human-powered
format of Mahalo returns fewer results than a larger engine, the fact that
they’re hand selected means that the results you are presented with are
much more likely to be high-quality, relevant ones.
- Dogpile – Once upon a
not-so-distant time, the go-to search engine for quick results was
Dogpile. Unceremoniously unseated by Google, the new Dogpile is staging a
comeback with a clean interface, respectable index and crosslinking.
- Lycos – Acting as both search engine
and web portal, the 1994 research project that became Lycos was one of the
world’s first internet ventures to turn a profit. Now owned by Hyderabad’s
Ybrant Digital, Lycos is still widely used.
- Info – Another single-query platform
that returns results from several engines, Info boasts an overlap rate of
only 5% in the top 20 searches and extensive vendor information.
- Search – With a proprietary
algorithm that sorts the results of several platforms into one cohesive
list, Search is a powerful engine that separates sponsored links from the
returned relevant results and allows customization of metasearch options.
In addition to these general search engines, there are
dozens of specialized offerings with an emphasis on specific media,
professional and industrial information and blogosphere results. Games and
entertainment also have their own niche in the market.
Contacts and sources:
Christine Kane
http://www.internetserviceproviders.org/blog/2012/10-search-engines-that-dont-start-with-a-g-b-or-y/
0 comments:
Post a Comment