Search Engines______________________________

NCWC Librarians Recommend:

Single search engines__________________________________

Google
http://www.google.com/
Returns results with high relevance and a short summary.

AltaVista
http://www.altavista.com/
Search for web sites, images, translations and more.

HotBot
http://hotbot.lycos.com/
Search for web sites, images, video, or sound back two years.

Guidebeam
http://guidebeam.com/
Retrieves targeted, focused results, presented in categories; optional framed view.

Teoma
http://www.teoma.com/
Ranks results based on the number of same-subject pages that reference it, not just popularity.

WebBrain
http://www.webbrain.com/html/default_win.html
Allows searcher to see the visual relationships that exist in a search query.

Ask Jeeves
http://www.askjeeves.com/
A natural language (plain English) search service.

Excite
http://www.excite.com/
Search web pages as well as current news and tv listings grouped by topic/channel.

Go.com
http://go.com/
Part of the Disney Internet group, provides access to web pages, images, news, and more.

Lycos
http://www.lycos.com/
Search for web pages in advanced mode using powerful Boolean-like operators, as well as a topical directory, sounds and images, and use special features to narrow your search.

Kid's Search Tools
http://www.rcls.org/ksearch.htm
Collection of search tools for locating information for kids.

Overture
http://www.overture.com/
Easy to use search service that allows companies to pay for higher placement in a list of results.

Invisible Web - What Normal Search Engines Can't See________  

CompletePlanet
http://www.completeplanet.com/
Searches over 100,000 databases and specialty search engines.

Direct Search
http://www.freepint.com/gary/direct.htm
Provides access to speeches, streaming news and public affairs, and web accessible Congressional Research Service Reports.

IncyWincy - Invisible Web Search Engine
http://www.incywincy.com/ 
Rich directory of sites organized by topic, as well as a powerful search engine.

Metasearch Engines - Search several search engines at the same time

IxQuick
http://www.ixquick.com/
A multiple/meta search engine, that executes the same search in several databases simultaneously.

QueryServer
http://queryserver.dataware.com/
A multiple search engine which searches the web as well as news, health, money, and government information.

Ithaki
Metasearch engine, that selectively targets specific search engines and removes duplicate results.

Fossick Meta Search
http://fossick.com/Search.htm
Search over 3,000 specialty search engines and topical guides; may also limit searches by country.

Vivisimo
http://vivisimo.com
Organizes search results by clustering similar documents; eliminates very long lists of results.

WebCrawler
http://webcrawler.com/
Searches the larger search engines, like Google, Yahoo, Teoma, and more and returns results of web pages, news, photos, and more.

Dogpile
http://www.dogpile.com/
Utilize various search services to look for web pages, newsgroup posting, software, and news.

Langenberg.com
http://www.langenberg.com/
A one-stop shopping site with access to topically related search engines in many areas, including area and zip codes, medicine, people and business finders, travel, weather, and much more.

Mamma - The Mother of All Search Engines
http://www.mamma.com/
Searches a variety of engines, directories, and deep content sites, formats the search request for each, puts the search results in a virtual database, removes duplicates, and displays results according to relevance.

NewsTrawler
http://www.newstrawler.com/nt/nt_home.html
Meta-search engine that specializes in searching archives of web news sources; good starting point for searching current news stories.

ProFusion
http://www.profusion.com/
Searches the nine most popular search engines. Allows the user to select the three fastest and returns results, noting how many came from a particular search engine. Presents unique items found.

Search.Com
http://www.search.com/
A good source of more specialized databases.

Search Thingy
http://www.searchthingy.com/search.asp
Places links to the most popular search engines (Google, Altavista, and more) on the same page, allowing the user to type the query once and search each resource separately.