Technology-Headlines

by Christine Kane

internetserviceproviders.org

In the world of online search engines, most people stop with the Big Three. Google, Bing and Yahoo! Search are indisputably the most widely used. For those who like to run off the beaten path or march to the beat of their own search engine, here are ten alternatives to consider the next time you need to find information online.

1. AltaVista – In operation since 1995, AltaVista is one of the web’s search trailblazers, and is still in operation today. For those of us who were around in the wild days of the internet’s infancy, the fact that the familiar name is still an existing entity might come as a surprise. Though they retained the name and url, AltaVista search was acquired by Yahoo! in 2003.
2. WebCrawler – If searching the Big Three individually just won’t do, spin all of them into one search with WebCrawler. With a single-query system that uses metasearch technology to trawl most of the major-player engines in one go, you’ll also find multimedia results and local news.
3. DuckDuckGo – DuckDuckGo is a pared-down approach to web searching, offering prompts for disambiguation and a zero-click feature that plops information in an easy-to-spot red box above the link results and a no-tracking policy for the privacy-minded user.
4. Ask – Once known as AskJeeves, Ask.com is another longtime player in the online world. A unique approach to results grouping and simple presentation make Ask a standout.
5. MetaCrawler – Taking its name from the metasearch technology that allows a single-query search of several indexed engines, MetaCrawler’s popularity peaked in the late 90′s, but the site is still in use and relatively popular today. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: General technology, Media, Services, 10 Search Engines That Don’t Start with a G, AltaVista, Ask, B, Bing, Dogpile, Duck Duck Go, Google, Info, Lycos, Mahalo, MetaCrawler, or Y, search, Web search engine, WebCrawler, Yahoo