Lee J Ballard, your internet wilderness guide

Search Engine Listing

Some people may find it hard to believe, but Google, AOL, Yahoo! and MSN are not the only search engines in town! While, it's true, the top 3-6 search engines do 90% of the business, there are still some quality alternatives.

My Top Search Engines & Directories

Yahoo! Launched in 1994, Yahoo! is probably the oldest search tool on the Web today. Continuing to innovate, Yahoo! gets my best of the best, narrowly beating out Google.

Google Voted four times as Search Engine Watches Most Outstanding Search Engine, Google is one of the best of the best. It is a robot-based search engine; it finds and ranks all pages programmatically.

MSN Search Finally coming of age, Microsoft's search engine is a solid choice. It is now fully automated and is growing in relevance and usability.

A9 And Amazon.com throws it's hat into the search engine ring!

Ask Jeeves Starting in 1998, Ask Jeeves uses "natural language" technology to understand queries. It gets it's main listings from Teoma.

AOL Search It's external search only serves hand-picks it's search results from Google, while it's internal search indexes the same content as well as pages viewable to AOL subscribers.

Jayde Jayde is a business to business, human edited search engine and directory.

LookSmart Newer company that adds content through it's paid business index and a free, human-edited directory. Very nice articles index.

DMOZ, Open Directory Powered exclusively by human editors, the Open Directory has a very limited search interface. What it lacks in usability it makes up for in quality results. Many search engines use the Directory to supplement their indexes.

HotBot HotBot offers no new content, but rather serves up access to Google and Ask Jeeve results. It is owned by Terra Lycos.

AltaVista Now owned by Yahoo, this old man of search engines still produces reasonably good results.

Lycos Search While Lycos is one of the oldest search engines around, it no longer spiders the Web for new sites. It now offers results from Yahoo! and LookSmart.

All The Web Powered by Yahoo!'s, All The Web is a decent little search engine.

Teoma Teoma is a crawler-based search engine, owned by Ask Jeeves. Check out the "Refine" and "Resources" features.

Gigablast A new kid on the block, Gigablast has added some interesting features, though it's index is still relatively small.

WiseNut Owned by Looksmart.

Honorable Mention