About.com, formerly the Mining Company, features hundreds of "guides" offering original content in various areas. While About.com isn't really a search service, the guides do have extensive links to other sites -- not to mention top-notch content of their own.
Links to top web sites and content from the Encyclopedia Britannica, in one place.
Excite results are dominated by paid listings from Overture, with non-paid results from Inktomi. Before Dec. 2001, Excite was a crawler-based search engine that gathered its own results. Excite was originally launched in late 1995. It grew quickly in prominence and consumed two of its competitors, Magellan in July 1996, and WebCrawler in November 1996. Magellan was discontinued in April 2001. WebCrawler continues to operate as a separate service, but it provides the same results at the Excite.com site itself. In Nov. 2001, Excite was acquired by InfoSpace, which also operates meta search engines Dogpile and MetaCrawler.
iWon's results come from both Overture & Inktomi. iWon gives away daily, weekly and monthly prizes in a marketing model unique among the major services. It launched in Fall 1999.
Search engine which lists pages from sites within the .au (Australia) and .nz (New Zealand) domains. It also provides global coverage.
WebCrawler is essentially a copy of the Excite service, above. WebCrawler was originally a completely independent service, opened to the public on April 20, 1994. It was started as a research project at the University of Washington. America Online purchased it in March 1995 and was the online service's preferred search engine until Nov. 1996. That was when Excite, a WebCrawler competitor, acquired the service.
Uses search results from FAST (see the Major Search Engines page).
Not your normal search engine, Aeiwi has you click on words to build your search. Reading the instructions is a must, but they aren't long.
A directory-style search engine that uses artificial intelligence techniques to cluster related topics and URLs together.
A searchable directory of web sites that offers instant indexing of submitted web sites.
The Open Directory uses volunteer editors to catalog the web. Formerly known as NewHoo, it was launched in June 1998. It was acquired by Netscape in November 1998, and the company pledged that anyone would be able to use information from the directory through an open license arrangement. Netscape itself was the first licensee. Netscape-owner AOL also uses Open Directory information, as does Google and Lycos. All of these services are described more on the Major Search Engines page.
Volunteer-driven directory where the community submits and rates web sites. Zeal is owned by LookSmart and provides listings for LookSmart's non-commercial categories. See the Major Search Engines page for more about LookSmart.
Volunteers either edit categories or simply participate as reviewers. The service is also supposed to provide rewards, including cash, to its contributors. Non-categorized results come from Google.
Uses bookmarks contributed by its members to allow users to search for sites of interest.
Allows anyone to create collections of information around different topics that are called "views." Views are extremely powerful. In addition to links to web pages, a view can contain parts of web pages, images, "informational elements" that pull data such as sports scores into a view, and more. It's also possible to search through the entire collection of contributed public view.
Based on the Open Directory, Xoron allows its editors to build out category listings and pays them for revenue generated by their areas. Formerly called Wherewithal, the directory changed its name in mid-2001 so that the Wherewithal name could be used for the company's collaborative editing software.
Metacrawlers & Metasearch Search Engines
Enter a search term, and Vivismo will not only pull back matching responses from major search engines but also automatically organize the pages into categories. Slick and easy to use. Winner of Best Meta Search Engine award from Search Engine Watch in 2002.
This meta search engine provides results from AllTheWeb, AltaVista, Google, Open Directory, Teoma, Wisenut and Yahoo. Advanced search offers access to more than 1,000 specialized resources, searchable by category. Honorable mention for Best Meta Search Engine award from Search Engine Watch in 2002.
If you like the idea of seeing your web results visually, this meta search site shows the results with sites being interconnected by keywords. Honorable mention for Best Meta Search Engine award from Search Engine Watch in 2002.
Searches against major engines or provides those who open free accounts the ability to chose from a list of hundreds. Using the "SiteSnaps" feature, you can preview any page in the results and see where your terms appear in the document. Allows results or documents to be saved for future use. Honorable mention for Best Meta Search Engine award from Search Engine Watch in 2002.
Fazzle offers a highly flexible and customizable interface to a wide variety of information sources, ranging from general web results to specialized search resources in a number of subject specific categories. Formerly called SearchOnline.
In a compact format, InfoGrid provides direct links to major search sites and topical web sites in different categories. Meta search and news searching is also offered.
This site is primarily designed to demonstrate classification technology from Infogistics. It's a meta search engine, and it does topical classification of results, like Vivisimo. However, it is unique in that you can select several different topics, then "drill down" to see results from all of them, rather than being restricted to the results from only one topic.
Ithaki is probably the most "global" of all meta search engines, available in 14 languages and offering more than 35 different categories for limiting your search. In addition, Ithaki offers country specific search, querying only local search engines rather than the regional versions of the major search engines.
Meta search engine that ranks results based on the number of "top 10" rankings a site receives from the various search engines.
Brings back listings from several major search engines as well as "Invisible Web" resources. Formerly based at the University of Kansas, the site was purchased by search company Intelliseek in April 2000.
Want to get multiple pages of results from a search engine combined into one single page? QB-Search will quickly join up to 200 pages of listings from major search engines.
Search against major web-wide search engines, as well as major news, health, money and government search services.
Turbo10 is a metasearch Engine accesses both traditional web search engines and some invisible web databases, with a very speedy interface.
Popular metasearch site owned by InfoSpace that sends a search to a customizable list of search engines, directories and specialty search sites, then displays results from each search engine individually.
Formerly a crawled-based search engine, Excite was acquired by InfoSpace in 2002 and uses the same underlying technology as the other InfoSpace meta search engines, but maintains its own portal features.
One of the oldest meta search services, MetaCrawler began in July 1995 at the University of Washington. MetaCrawler was purchased by InfoSpace, an online content provider, in Feb. 97.
Formerly a crawled-based search engine owned by Excite, Webcrawler was acquired by InfoSpace in 2002 and uses the same underlying technology as the other InfoSpace meta search engines, but offers a fast and clean, ad-free interface.
Founded in 1996, Mamma.com is one of the oldest meta search engines on the web. Mamma searches against a variety of major crawlers, directories and specialty search sites. The service also provides a paid listings option for advertisers, .
Search.com is a meta search engine operated by CNET. It offers both web-wide search and a wide variety of specialty search options. Search.com uses technology from SavvySearch, which was acquired by CNET in October 1999. The SavvySearch site itself no longer operates. SavvySearch was one of the older metasearch services, around since May 1995 and formerly based at Colorado State University.
Metasearch against several major search engines or within subject categories.
Gimenei queries an undisclosed number of search engines and removes duplicates from results. Its most useful feature is an advanced search form that allows you to limit your search to a specific country.
IcySpicy is both a meta search engine offering results from Google, Overture, MSN, WiseNut, FindWhat, etc., and a collection of useful directory links and search forms for package tracking, movie locations, and so on.
Search against several major search engines and paid listings services. Offers a nice option to see Alexa info about pages that are listed.
Moonmist allows you to do a general or country specific meta search. Results include links to site info and a link to the Wayback machine's archived copies of the underlying result page.
Easy to choose exactly which search engines you wish to query, and the same listings found at multiple search engines are combined together.
Meta search service that queries major kid-friendly search engines.
Searches 15 U.K. engines. The advanced search form allows you to change the order that results are presented, either by speed or manually to suit your own preferences.
Spanish metacrawler that searches on the more popular search engines. Motor de busqueda que busca tu consulta en los buscadores mas populares en espanol.
Watson is a "Swiss Army Knife" with nineteen interfaces to web content and services -- an improvement on Sherlock, with nearly twice as many tools, including Google Searching.
Travel search engine that lets you locate information about destinations.
Exes crawls travel-oriented sites that are submitted to it.
Wedding Search Engine, wedding websites. Add URL!
