A couple years ago Altavista, was one the best at finding relevant sites on the web but suffered from neglect and been left by other search engines. Currently Altavista has one of the lowest levels of accuracy of the search engines and metasearch engines tested. Particular areas of weakness include; natural language queries, obscure information and popular sites.

AskJeeves provides an uncluttered, appealing interface for the beginning searcher. AskJeeves searches its own database, and that of Altavista, Infoseek, Excite, Yahoo, and Webcrawler. While it only lists the top few from each of these, you are bound to find at least one page of highly relevant information. One of the first meta search engines, Ask Jeeves has now been surpassed by others that offer more sophisticated control of searches and more comprehensive findings. Urls for Ask Jeeves include: aj.com, ask.com, askjeeves.com.

One of the first and most commonly used meta search engines, dogpile searches three databases at a time and then asks if you want to search more. Provides options allowing you to select which databases to search. Results are average in relevancy and is sequential mode of searching is more cumbersome than many of the newer, more accurate and comprehensive meta search engines.

Excites features, its personalized page with news and portfolio tracking. Excite uses a spider to pick up pages linked to root urls and pages submitted to it. One problem with the current algorithm is that you are just as likely to find an unimportant page, such as the copyright page for a site listed as the root url. Results are listed according to how keywords are found on the pages with no significant ranking according to site relevance or popularity. Depending on the keyword(s) used, Excite presents the user first with a category or site listed under "Try These First". Next it lists sites under "Directory Results" finally additional web sites under "Web Results".

Its robot collects pages whether they've been submitted or not making it a very comprehensive engine. Technically its not a meta search engine but it in essence functions as one. Now searches Netscape's Open Project Directory in addition to its own database. Ranks sites by number of incoming links and the popularity of referring sites. Findings are highly relevant, particularly for searches with two or more words. Includes redundant listings.

HotBot uses DirectHit, the Open Directory Project and Inktomi's databases. While the Open Directory Project and Inktomi represent two of the largest databases their size doesn't mean the algorithms used to sort the data can guarantee accurate results. While HotBot provides listings that may be somewhat related to the search terms, its accuracy, i.e. its ability to provide highly relevant listings is limited as compared to the many meta search engines. Still HotBot it is one of the better individual search engines and includes advanced search options on the homepage. HotBot is one of the earlier search engines for the web.

This meta search engine is fast, comprehensive and ranks findings by relevance. Searches 14 engines. Results ranked by relevancy and includes information about which search engine it came from. Currently one of the few meta search tools that supports regular searches, natural language searches, and advanced boolean searches, and knows which engines can handle which types of searches. If a page is listed in more than one search engine, Ixquick tells you which engines and how it was ranked. Does include some redundant listings but overall one of the best metasearch engines.

Brings together data from FAST, Direct Search and the Open Project Directory. Only limitation to being a truly great search engine is its ability to provide relevant results and eliminate redundant pages.

Northern Light uses its own propietary database covering 220 million web pages and 20 million articles. When you conduct a search it puts a column of folders on the left of related topics. Below each site listed, Northen Light puts a folder of additional pages from that site, eliminating the appearance of multiple and or redundant listings from the same site.

The goal of this new engine is to produce the most comprehensive directory of the web, and its well on its way to accomplishing this goal. Similar to Yahoo, listings are organized by category and reviewed by editors, though the Open Directory Project relies on a vast army of volunteer editors. While Yahoo can take months to submissions are usually included in the Open Directory Project within weeks.

An easy way to access 30 of the most popular search engines and meta search tools. Proteus ranks among the most powerful Internet search services on the Internet. With its powerful, unique and easy "Type Once, Search Everywhere" interface, Proteus permits you to submit the same search terms to various search engines so you may get the best results often without having to retype them.

Responding to the need for focused, comprehensive and reliable overviews of relevant scientific information, Elsevier Science has developed the powerful Internet search tool Scirus. Scirus distinguishes itself from existing search engines by concentrating on scientific content only and by searching both web and journal sources. It covers only websites that contain scientific content, such as university web sites and author homepages. It currently covers the Web, ScienceDirect, MEDLINE on BioMedNet, Beilstein on ChemWeb, Neuroscion, BioMed Central and Patents from the USPTO. It enables scientists, students and anyone searching for scientific information to chart and pinpoint data, locate university sites, and find reports and articles in a clutter-free, user-friendly and efficient manner.

Search Engine Colossus offers you links to search engines from 199 countries around the world! Conduct exhaustive web searches. Search the web using your choice of language. Locate your new favourite search engines.

Thousands of "search engines" announce their existence every year. Only a large handful of these are worth noting. Many claim to be the "most comprehensive" but only have a handful of listings. Others are just duplicates of existing search sites. Search IQ helps you to stay up to date on emerging and existing search engines.Search IQ helps you to monitor announcements regarding existing search engines. Search Engines are listed under Metasearch Engines, General Use Engines, Spciality Search Engine, PC-Based Tools nad Link Guides. The site provides detailed reviews of search engines.

One of a new generation of metasearch engines. Like a handful of other metasearch engines, Vivisimo provides comprehensive coverage, finding relevant listings. In addition Vivisimo clusters listings covering similar topics. You can scroll through these on the main part of the page or click on the handy folders on the left hand side of the page. Either way this additional organization makes it easier to navigate the search results and find what you are looking for more quickly. A lean and simple design along with options for configuring the page view (only in Internet Explorer) make this new tool among the top ten search tools.

WebCrawler is a meta-search engine that searches the Internet's top search engines such as AltaVista, Direct Hit, Looksmart and About. With one single, powerful search engine, you get the most comprehensive results. When you use WebCrawler, you are actually searching many search engines simultaneously.

Xrefer is a giant online reference library. It covers all the reference books that you may find in any good reference library. xrefer includes encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri and books of quotations, not to mention a range of subject-specific titles covering everything from art to accountancy and literature to law. xrefer is pleased to announce the launch of its new digital reference library, xreferplus. Building on the unique concept and technologies behind the web's reference engine, xreferplus offers libraries of all types and sizes access to an unparalleled digital reference collection. Containing 100 books from more than 20 world-class publishers and offering new functionality, check out what xreferplus can offer your library now.

Yahoo continues to be by far the most popular way to find information on the web of any of the search engines and directories. With one of the smallest databases (less than a million sites) Yahoo gets as more traffic than Excite and Altavista put together. Yahoo is successful because its quality control is high providing users with high quality links and without all the redundant listings that plague so many of the search engines. Yahoo is a directory, not a search engine, making it possible to look up information within categories. The result of Yahoo's painstaking efforts to ensure the integrity of its directory is that it is is one of the easiest ways to find information on the web. Yahoo is particularly helpful when looking for types of businesses such as "online brokers". Using Yahoo you'll get an alphabetically organized list of all "online brokers" compared to a typical search engine which provides you with a listing of any page that uses the words online or brokers in its text. Directories like Yahoo won't help you find obscure or current information, though Yahoo now defaults to the comprehensive Google for queries it can't find in its database. While Yahoo is one of the best ways to find information on the net, it does have a number of limitations. To find relevant information can take many steps through a morass of categories. Information in the database is limited for the most part to homepage data and more and more of Yahoo's listings are out-of-date, i.e. to sites that no longer exist.