Search Engine supermarket

Mention the word search engine and most people think of Google where any given search can easily bring up a million + results.. Launched in 1999, by June 2000 Google had built up a search listing of 560 million pages, by June 2004 that increased to over 4 billion pages. Although very comprehensive in its coverage there are other alternatives.

Although it is certainly the most popular of modern search engines Google is only one of four major crawler based search engines. These sites actually crawl the internet building their own site listings against which your queries are matched.

Unlike search engines, metacrawlers (metasearchers) don't actually search the web but instead send search queries to several search engines at once. The results are then blended together into a single page. Strangely enough they tend to return less results than a search done within the sites they search.

As rated by Search Engine Watch, the following are some of the major metacrawlers.

  • Founded in 1996, Mamma is one of the oldest metasearchers.
  • Dogpile is one of the best known and most popular.
  • Vivisimo clusters results into categories for easy researching.
  • Kartoo presents results visually interconnecting sites with keywords.
  • SurfWax has a snap feature which allows you to preview the sections of the site containing your keyword/s.
  • Excite was originally a popular search engine but has been reborn as a metasearcher
An interesting addition to search engines is Soople which contains an easy-to-use interface for doing Google advanced searches for file types (eg. ppt), domain names (eg.edu), multiple sites (eg. magazines), news sites, other languages, images etc.

Another category of websites have been set up as subject directories. These sites operate just like a library and contain links to websites listed in subject areas.

The major search engines make no allowances for the age of the person submitting the search request. As a result, primary school students are often faced with pages of unsuitable material in their search results. Ivy's search engine resources for kids.contains many links to resources for use by young students. Three of the most valuable search engines for kids are:

Sites listed on the above three directories have been checked by humans to ensure their suitability for viewing by children.

For comprehensive information on all things regarding search engines refer to Search Engine Watch to find out about major search engines, directories, meta-search engines, multimedia search engines (images, audio, video), kids’ search engines and a lot more. Another good site with up to date information on the latest search engine evaluations and news is Search Engine Showdown.