| Google | Ask Web power users, and they'll tell you that Google is the best search engine, bar none. A pure, unadulterated search engine; returns the most relevant search results with the fewest broken links. Google consistently turns up fast, high-quality, highly relevant results. Google does well on specific queries, as well as broad-topic searches. When the page you want to access is no longer live, you can view a cached copy of the way it looked the last time Google crawled it. |
| Northern Light | Whether you need an answer to a highly specific query or to a general keyword search, Northern Light is a good engine. You can use wildcard and Boolean operators to define your search. Power Search tools help define where to look, allowing you to limit searches to URLs or company names. |
| Oingo | Oingo's strength is its ability to zero in on what you're really looking for by providing drop-down boxes (multiple boxes for multiple terms) to help focus your query. Simple and complex multiword queries return very good results. |
| HotBot | For complex, carefully targeted searches, HotBot is one of the better search engines. HotBot provides an impressive number of ways to specify what you seek and where to find it. The engine's strengths lie with its advanced search and personalizing options. |
| Yahoo! | Exhaustive lists of links, tools, and services; easy-to-read interface. Yahoo's underlying search engine, Inktomi, is ranked by users as one of the most accurate on the Web. |
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Direct Hit | Direct Hit excels at home page targeting. This is because it rates Web sites by popularity, on the assumption that the most popular sites are the most useful. Results come with ranking icons of one to five little orange men, depending on how many people visit the site and how long they stay. Direct Hit also provides related searches to help you refine your search. |
| MetaCrawler |
To dig up information from every Web nook and cranny, try MetaCrawler. Because MetaCrawler submits your query to 12 of the best search engines on the Web (including Direct Hit, AltaVista, Infoseek, WebCrawler, and Excite), each search can potentially turn up thousands of results per site. Plus, MetaCrawler returns matches lightning fast. |
| Search Engine Watch | Most visitors to Search Engine Watch fall into one of two groups. There are webmasters, web marketers and others involved with creating and promoting web sites. Then there are search engine users, everyone from researchers, librarians and general web surfers who want to know how to find things better using search engines. This site features: How search engines find and rank web pages, with an emphasis on what webmasters can do to improve how search engines list their web sites; tips on how to use search engines better, along with fun stuff like ways to see how people search online; a list of comparison reviews, shows which search engines are most popular, and has tests and statistics related to how well search engines work; a collection of links to search engine related resources across the Web.
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