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About.com
http://www.about.com
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.
AllTheWeb.com (FAST Search)
http://www.alltheweb.com
AllTheWeb.com
(also known as FAST Search)
consistently has one of the largest indexes of the web. FAST
also offers large multimedia and mobile/wireless web
indexes, available from its site. The site, also known as
AllTheWeb.com, is a showcase for FAST's search technologies.
FAST's results are provided to numerous portals, including
those run by Terra Lycos. FAST Search launched in May 1999.
AltaVista
http://www.altavista.com
AltaVista is one of the oldest
crawler-based search engines on the web. It also offers news
search, shopping search and multimedia search. AltaVista
opened in December 1995. It was owned by Digital, then run
by Compaq (which purchased Digital in 1998), then spun off
into a separate company which is now controlled by CMGI.
AOL
Search
http://search.aol.com
AOL Search allows its members to search across the web and
AOL's own content from one place. The "external" version,
listed above, does not list AOL content. The main listings
come Inktomi (see below). Google is to replace Inktomi in
the summer of 2002.
Ask
Jeeves
http://www.askjeeves.com
Ask Jeeves is a human-powered search service that aims to
direct you to the exact page that answers your question. It
also integrates information from the Teoma service that it
owns (see below). Ask Jeeves also owns the Direct Hit
service, but results from Direct Hit are no longer offered
directly though the Direct Hit site.
Britannica.com
http://www.britannica.com
Links to top websites and content from
the Encyclopedia Britannica, in one place.
Excite
http://www.excite.com
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.
Google
http://www.google.com
Google is a top choice for web
searchers. It offers the largest collection of web pages of
any crawler-based search engine. Google makes heavy use of
link analysis as a primary way to rank these pages. This can
be especially helpful in finding good sites in response to
general searches such as "cars" and "travel," because users
across the web have in essence voted for good sites by
linking to them. The system works so well that Google has
gained wide-spread praise for its high relevancy. Google
provides web page search results to a variety of partners,
including Yahoo and Netscape Search (see below). Google also
provides the ability to search for images, through Usenet
discussions and its own version of the Open Directory (see
below).
HotBot
http://www.hotbot.com
In most cases, HotBot's first page of
results comes from the Direct Hit service (see Ask Jeeves,
above), and then secondary results come from the Inktomi
search engine, which is also used by other services. It gets
its directory information from the Open Directory project
(see below). HotBot launched in May 1996 as Wired Digital's
entry into the search engine market. Lycos purchased Wired
Digital in October 1998 and continues to run HotBot as a
separate search service. |
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Inktomi
http://www.inktomi.com
Originally, there was an
Inktomi search engine at UC Berkeley. 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.
There is no way to query the Inktomi index directly, as it
is only made available through Inktomi's partners with
whatever filters and ranking tweaks they may apply.
iWon
http://www.iwon.com
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.
LookSmart
http://www.looksmart.com
LookSmart is a human-compiled
directory of websites. In addition to being a stand-alone
service, LookSmart provides directory results to MSN Search,
Excite and many other partners. Inktomi provides LookSmart
with search results when a search fails to find a match from
among LookSmart's reviews. LookSmart launched independently
in October 1996, was backed by Reader's Digest for about a
year, and then company executives bought back control of the
service.
Lycos
http://www.lycos.com
Lycos started out as a search engine,
depending on listings that came from spidering the web. In
April 1999, it shifted to a directory model similar to
Yahoo. Its main listings come from AllTheWeb.com with some
results from the Open Directory project. In October 1998,
Lycos acquired the competing HotBot search service, which
continues to be run separately.
MSN
Search
http://search.msn.com
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.
Netscape Search
http://search.netscape.com
Netscape Search's results come
primarily from the Open Directory and Netscape's own "Smart
Browsing" database, which does an excellent job of listing
"official" websites. Secondary results come from Google. At
the Netscape Netcenter
portal site, other search engines are also featured.
Open
Directory
http://dmoz.org
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.
WebCrawler
http://www.webcrawler.com
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.
Yahoo
http://www.yahoo.com
Yahoo is the web's most popular search
service and has a well-deserved reputation for helping
people find information easily. The secret to Yahoo's
success is human beings. It is the largest human-compiled
guide to the web, employing about 150 editors in an effort
to categorize the web. Yahoo has well over 1 million sites
listed. Yahoo also supplements its results with those from
Google. If a search fails to find a match within Yahoo's own
listings, then matches from Google are displayed. Google
matches also appear after all Yahoo matches have first been
shown. Yahoo is the oldest major website directory, having
launched in late 1994
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