Search Engines
When this page was first written, there were several candidates for leading search engine. However, these have mostly dropped away, leaving Google with the crown. However, not all of the specialist Google searches are particularly well known, so here are a few of the options.
| Google Directory | Google Images | |
| Google Maps | Google Scholar | |
| Other contenders include | ||
| Yahoo | AlltheWeb | |
| Ask Jeeves | Altavista | |
Meta Search Engines
There are also a number of sites which relay your search request to a number of different search engines (such as those in the first list above) and then (perhaps) organise the results obtained. Two examples of these are Dogpile and Metacrawler.
Evaluating Search Engines
This page is only sporadically updated. For a guide to the best search engine for your needs, along with statistics on various search engines, the following are well worth reading. Unfortunately, neither seems to have been updated all that recently either...
- The User's Guide to Web Searching
- Lots of information about search engines and how they work, and lists the strengths and weaknesses of several major search engines using many comparative statistics. These are independently generated, and are often radically different from the official site stats.
- Search Engine Watch
- Collection of reviews and comparisons of all aspects of search engines.
Anton Cox
(A.G.Cox@city.ac.uk)
Last modified: Tue 10 Jan 2006