Search Engines

A listing of popular or highly useful search engines or metasearch engines. Search engines are online forms that receive (usually) textual input from users, search one or more indexes of online resources, and return ranked results deemed relevant to the user's input. (Always evaluate a website, or other online resource, to determine how trustworthy and reliable the information is. See Internet Resource Evaluation under Web Searching Guides below to learn how to evaluate the authority of online resources.)

Sub-headings:

Audio/Video Search Engines

These search engines specifically search for audio/video files on the web, but be sure to check out the other listed search engines and metasearch engines. They often provide specialized searches for media.

Clustered Results Search Engines

These are search engines that cluster the results in one way or another, so as to make it easier to look at more results simultaneously or interpret results more quickly.

Image Search Engines

These search engines specialize in finding images. Always find out if an image has a copyright before using it, ask permission from the creator and/or owner before using an image if they do or if you are not sure, and properly cite copyrighted image in papers and presentations (see our Reference >> Style and Writing Guides section).

Metasearch Engines

List of search engines that search multiple other search engines at once and return the results.

Web Searching Guides

These guides explain how to search the web and/or point to useful tools for searching the web.

Resources in this category:

Alexa
http://www.alexa.com/

Alexa is one of the largest "Web crawls" or search engines out there, but it's better known for its great web tools, such as its traffic rankings feature, which provides quick statistics about web sites, and its web search platform, which allows users to create their own search engines and web tools. It is also a web directory.

AlltheWeb
http://www.alltheweb.com/

Has "one of the largest and freshest indices" (Yahoo! provides the index) of billions of sites, along with great search capabilities "image, audio, and video searches include hundreds of millions of multimedia files."

AltaVista
http://www.altavista.com/

A high profile search engine popularly known for its Babel Fish Translation site that translates websites into different languages. Other features include web, images, MP3/audio, video, and news searches.

AOL Search
http://search.aol.com/aol/webhome

Using Google's search engine, AOL Search offers many additional features. In particular, it has a SafeSearch feature for filtering out offensive content, drop-down menus offering alternative search terms and phrases, and easily accessible search history for repeating previous searches.

Ask.com
http://www.ask.com/#subject:ask|pg:1

Formerly AskJeeves.com, Ask.com has become a rival to Google and an excellent search engine, offering previews of some sites, links for expanding and narrowing your search, and other helpful features.

BookworkSearch: Crawling digital pages wisely
http://www.bookwormsearch.com/

A search engine that specializes in finding information on books and authors. It also returns results "in real, meaningful information."

Brainboost Answer Engine
http://www.answers.com/bb/

An answer engine rather than a search engine, Brainboost "finds answers to questions posed in plain English as opposed to directing you to pages that simply mention the question"

CiteSeer.IST: Computer and Information Science Papers
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cs

"CiteSeer is a scientific literature digital library and search engine that focuses primarily on the literature in computer and information science (that) aims to improve the dissemination and feedback of the scientific literature and to provide improvements in functionality, usability, availability, cost, comprehensiveness, efficiency, and timeliness in the access of scientific and scholarly knowledge."

Exalead
http://www.exalead.com/search

A French search engine that offers features such as thumbnail previews of results and target pages, terms for refining your search listed next to the results, and nested boolean (AND, OR, NOT) search capabilities as well as proximity searching by using "NEAR" in your query.

Factbites
http://www.factbites.com/

"Factbites presents the user with full, meaningful sentences from every site in the search results." Topic- rather than keyword-based, the site can return results on what you want to know that don't include the words you typed in. Uncommon word combinations can lead to no or poor results.

Google
http://www.google.com/

The largest and most highly used search engine on the net, Google provides a score of additional features besides searching such as e-mail, webpage creation and storage, online text and article searching, and more.

Healia - your search for health
http://www.healia.com/healia/

Great search engine for finding medical and health-related resources online. Results can then be personalized according to sex, age, medical authority, reading level, internet browser type, and more! Not a replacement for a doctor or professional but a great tool to for helping the health care consumer be better informed.

Healthline
http://www.healthline.com/

Healthline is both a health search engine and a provider of its own articles on medical topics. This information clearinghouse offers its own doctor reviewed articles and searches other sites that its on-staff doctors and medical experts consider to be "the top health sites on the Web."

IceRocket Web Search
http://www.icerocket.com/index?tab=web&q=

This search engine can search blogs and myspace.

Lycos
http://www.lycos.com/

Now powered in part by Windows Live Search, this oldy-but-goody search engine is a good place to find music and video downloads, and its "Fast Forward" feature opens a sidebar in your browser for faster investigation of search results.

Search Engine Watch
http://searchenginewatch.com/

News and tips relating to WWW search engines, including tips for searching and tips for webmasters who want to make their pages more accessable. Covers mainly the 'major' search engines: Alta Vista, AOL NetFind, Excite, HotBot, InfoSeek, Lycos, Search.Com, WebCrawler, Yahoo.

SearchMash
http://www.searchmash.com/

This time-saving search engine powered by Google offers the ability to look within the search results of a search for images, videos, wikis, and blogs and it does so without going to a new web page. It also lets you view more web results without having to view a new web page.

SurfWax
http://www.surfwax.com/

Lists results by title only along with the search engine used to identify the result. Clicking the magnifying glass icon sends the user to preview of the website in the right side of the screen. The "Facilitator" or "Full Text" option shows where your term matched in the page of a specific result.

Windows Live Search
http://www.live.com/

Micosoft's search engine

Yahoo!
http://www.yahoo.com/

Yahoo! is the second most widely known entity on the web and provides an excellent search engine, although it's better known for instant messaging, e-mail, and perhaps for it's directory.