Which Are The Good Search Engines?

[Alan]

There are over 300 Internet search engines available for free use. All of them have their individual merits, and they each use different techniques for how to catalog the billions of web pages around the world.

I) Five major "search engines" do stand out, however, for their massive catalogs of information: Google.com and its Amazon.com variant, A9.com, AllTheWeb.com, AskJeeves.com, Vivisimo.com and Dogpile.com.

These five database engines use "spiders" (automated programs) to read thousands of pages per day, and index them for easy finding later.

II) Three major "search directories" also stand out for their voluminous catalogs: Yahoo's Directory, DMOZ.org, and About.com. Different from search engines, these three search directories use human editors and reader submissions to hand-pick their catalogued content. With human reading being much slower than robot spiders, you can expect search directories to be much smaller than search engines. The human editor element, however, does add the filter of human judgment, which can help cut down the drivel you have to sift through when searching.

III) So, when it comes to the question, "which search tool is the best?", the real question should perhaps be: "which search tool do you personally prefer?" Google.com has the least advertising on its screen, and the most indexed content of all the search engines. DMOZ is slower to load, but it has excellent depth of content. Vivisimo uses "clustering" to present results in categorized format. About.com has lots of advertising, but has amazing subject matter expertise. Ask Jeeves, Dogpile, and AllTheWeb have their pros and cons, too. There are almost 300 other search tool choices not even listed here. Whichever you personally prefer, every one of these search tools contains more content than you or I could ever read in a lifetime! The smart choice, accordingly, would be to test and compare these major search tools for yourself.

Don't settle for one search tool! Use different search engines and directories in combination! Not only do search tools change their appearance every few months, you are also more likely to locate higher-quality web pages when you combine the high volume of spidered content, and the hand-picked reviewing of human editors. Rotate your search tools, avoid the rut of relying on only one search engine, show some perseverance and patience, and you will get good results.