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Search Engines

A search engine is a searchable database of websites which have been collected by a computer program (usually called a crawler, robot, or spider). Although there may appear to be a choice of hundreds of search engines on the web, in reality most of them rely on the same major search engines.

The following are the most popular search engines:

Google

is the most popular choice for web searchers. It offers the largest collection of web pages of any crawler-based search engine. Google makes use of link analysis as a way to rank pages. Google provides web page search results to a variety of partners, including Yahoo and The Open Directory Project

Yahoo

Similar to a search engine, but with a database generated by hand, this is the world's most used directory of websites. The main URL is http://www.yahoo.com. It is notoriously difficult to get listed in Yahoo and, once listed, even more difficult to get your listing changed or to get out!

Alltheweb

is the public search engine and technology for FAST. It is a search with a simple interface and huge database behind it, currently holding over 2 billion pages. You can also find news, picture, video, MP3 and FTP in its search.

Teoma

Using the same database as Ask Jeeves, it ranks sites partly by subject-specific popularity. Subject-Specific Popularity ranks a site based on the number of same-subject pages that reference it, not just general popularity, to determine a site's level of authority. It clusters results into subject groups, and lists related link collections by experts and enthusiasts where appropriate.

MSN Search

Microsoft's MSN Search service is a LookSmart-powered directory of websites, with secondary results that come from Inktomi. Direct Hit data is also made available. It has now taken the database from the long awaited Live.com Beta search engine.

AOL

The main listings for categories and websites come from the Open Directory and Inktomi also provides crawler-based results, as backup to the directory information.

Inktomi search engine

Originally, there was an Inktomi search engine. The creators then formed their own company with the same name and created a new Inktomi index, which was first used to power HotBot. Now the Inktomi index also powers several other services. All of them tap into the same index, though results may be slightly different. This is because Inktomi provides ways for its partners to use a common index yet distinguish themselves.

AltaVista

is one of the oldest crawler-based search engines on the web. It has a large index of web pages and a wide range of power searching commands. It also offers news search, shopping search and multimedia search.

Lycos

started out as a search engine, depending on listings that came from spidering the web. Its main listings come from AllTheWeb.com with some results from the Open Directory project. Lycos also acquired HotBot in 1998, which continues to be run separately.

Ixquick

A meta search engine that is new to the scene. It finds sites rated best by multiple search engines for your search.

Ask

Ask Jeeves is a human-powered search service. You ask questions and it directs you to the pages that answers your question. Ask Jeeves also uses result from many pay-per-click engines. It has been rebranded ASK, they have dropped the asking alex catch phrase.

WiseNut

is another new on the scene search engine. Uses a context sensitive algorithm. It has an index of 1.5 billion pages and the search results are clustered into categories.

Exite

Owns easy to use Webcrawler, Excite is a portal that offers a search service including search of a directory from the ODP

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