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The JafSoft Search Engine "search engine"
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Contents of this page
IntroductionThis page is intended to list all the search engines that JafSoft become aware of, together with - where possible - a review of the engine, and links to useful pages related to the engine. For each page we aim to list the advanced search page, the help page, and the add URL page.
We will also list (near the end) other search-engine related sites.
You can view a shorter version of this page listing just the URLs, should you wish to bookmark this. Also you can view a list of web robots.
In part this list will be assembled by monitoring access to robots.txt on our site, following up references in USENET, and observing search engines that people use to find our pages.
Many of the major search engines are trying to become "portal sites". Such sites want you to use them as your starting point so they can raise advertising revenue. In return you'll find a combination of news, free email, free web space and a directory on offer.
We ignore all that here, we're just concerned with how they hack it as a search engine, the rest is (time wasting) window dressing for our current purposes.
If you find the adverts and graphics are slowing down a good search engine, use your browser's options to switch them off.
Please report any broken links to search@jafsoft.com
Links to sections most recently added to these pages :-
www.crosslinkz.com - meta search engine
www.rustran.com - English/Russian online translation
www.slider.com - encylopedia and search engine
www.virtualfish.com - meta search engine7 June 2001
www.aesop.com - new search engine
http://tarjim.ajeeb.com/ajeeb/default.asp - arabic translation
www.apromotionguide.com - search engine-related site
www.diggit.com - image finder
www.ilor.com - enhanced Google site
www.mapplanet.com - Geographical search engine
http://pandecta.com/mother.html - search engine-related site
www.singingfish.com - file finder
www.subjex.com - conversation-based search engine
www.teoma.com - new search engine
http://traffick.com/ - search engine-related site
www.vivisimo.com - new serach engine using clustering technology
www.webmasterworld.com - discussion forums
www.wisenut.com - new search engine
Help is at http://www.alltheweb.com/help.php3
Add URL at http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php3
You can read about Fast at http://www.fast.no/index.php?d=aboutNew, fast Norwegian search engine who claim to have more pages than anyone else indexed, with an aim of indexing everything. These people plan to sell this search engine technology to others, so expect to see more of this. Site offers specialised FTP and MP3 search engines, but the search facilities are a little primitive at present.
Text-only version at http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/text
Translation at http://babelfish.altavista.com/translate.dyn
Advanced search at http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/adv
Add URLs at http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/addurlOne of the oldest (ancient in Internet terms), and still one of the greats. AltaVista offers more options than most other sites, although if you push the envelope with complex queries it can break down. Over the years it has been the first to trail many types of search engine technology (text-only sites, mulit-lingual, translations, picture finding, even Java applets linking results). Although they lost the plot slightly through the "portal years", happilly AltaVista is again focusing on it's search engine.
AltaVista remains one of the biggest, fastest and most comprehensive search engines around. To get the most from it familiarization with the advanced search options is a must, and pays dividends.
About the only thing wrong with AltaVista used to be the irritating limit of 10 results per page, but now even that can be "personalised" away.
"power search" at http://www.dejanews.com/home_ps.shtml
Power help at http://www.dejanews.com/help/help_ps.shtmlRecently taken over by Google, DejaNews is currently in a state of flux
Search engine dedicated to USENET posting only. Search by keywords, date author, newsgroup, etc. A very powerful tool for finding answers to a question you're sure someone will have asked before.
Many people use DejaNews as their newsreader, and it is possible to post to USENET from DejaNews, though you'll need an account, and it used to be that emails have to be confirmed before the post is dispatched.
Advanced search help is at http://www.excite.com/Info/searching3.html
although is offers little more than how to construct boolean expressions. Add URL at http://www.excite.com/info/add_url/A large search engine with one of the more energetic spiders, but in my experience patchy in the relevance of sites it displays. We see a lot of people come to our site from Excite for quite the wrong reasons. For example at one point any search including the word "definition" (didn't matter what of) listed one of my pages at number 1.
Excite seems biased to keyword repetition near the top of a page, and in the above example the repetition of the word "definition" became so strong that what definitions you were looking for became irrelevant.
There's no advanced search as such, but read the search tips.
Search tips and help at
http://magellan.excite.com/magellan/Info/advancedtips.htmlAdd URL at http://magellan.excite.com/info/add_url
Another Excite-based search engine, although again with a smaller-than-Excite database.
Advanced search at http://www.google.com/advanced_search
Help is at http://www.google.com/help.html
Add URL is at http://www.google.com/addurl
Read about Google at http://www.google.com/why_use.htmlSince Google was released in beta (Apr'99) it's taken the search engine world by storm. This site was developed as a research project, but is much praised for the accuracy of its results, which it achieves by calculating how relevant a site is to the search term. It's also popular because of it's fast advert-free way of delivering results. Google is now allowing itself to be used commercially on other sites
It includes a whimsical "I'm feeling lucky" option which will take you straight to the first results page, but believe me.. no-one is that lucky with a search query!
More options can be found at
http://www.hotbot.com/?MT=&SM=MC&DV=0&LG=any&DC=10&DE=2&_v=2&OPs=MDRTP&act.super.x=151&act.super.y=23Advanced help is buried in the menus at
http://www.hotbot.com/help/tips/search_features.aspAdd URL at http://www.hotbot.com/addurl.asp
Text-only version at http://hotbot.lycos.com/text/
Another largish index. Has a nicer interface than AltaVista, especially as regards finding recent additions, and generally gives good results. Recently has merged with Lycos.
Advanced search is at http://infoseek.go.com/find?pg=advanced_www.html&ud9=advanced_www and
requires Javascript
Tips can be found at http://infoseek.go.com/Help?pg=SearchTips.html
Add URL at http://infoseek.go.com/AddUrl?pg=SubmitUrl.htmlA slightly smaller engine. Originally this engine didn't appear to "spider" a site, with the results that only submitted URLs are listed. I'm not sure this is still true.
Infoseek seems to bias towards keywords in the Title of a page with the result that results are usually fairly relevant, it being a lot harder to spam a page title.
Recently they've added the "cute" feature of highlighting matched words in a "marker pen" effect.
Advanced search at http://www.lycos.co.uk/search/options.html
Add a site at http://www.lycos.co.uk/service/addasite.html. This
also allows you to check is your site is already listed.
Lycos.com will automatically direct you to your regional variant (.co.uk) in our case. Consequently the above URLs are UK-based.Groups results by website, which can sometimes be useful
Power search at http://www.northernlight.com/power.html
Help (several pages) at http://www.northernlight.com/docs/search_help_optimize.html
Add URL at http://www.northernlight.com/docs/regurl_help.htmlNorthern Light is one of the more active robots. It seems to have a large database as a result of its spidering. It has a number of specialised search options.
No Advanced search (but supports AltaVista syntax)
Help is at http://ragingsearch.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=acc&v=help
No Add URL (add to AltaVista instead)
Customize at http://doc.altavista.com/raging-custom/results.htmlNOTE: In recent times the ragingsearch site simply re-directs back into the revamped AltaVista site
I read this as AltaVista's response to Google. Using the same database and search syntax, the site is fast and can be customised to offer 100 results per page (hurrah!). Largely graphics free, it seems free of some of the bloat that has crept in to Altavista over the years.
No Advanced search
Read about Super Snooper at http://www.supersnooper.com/AboutDisclaim.htm
Check your URL at http://www.supersnooper.com/CheckURL.htm
Add your URL at http://www.supersnooper.com/AddURL.htmSuper Snooper's robot vets all sites for obscenity of various type. The results are presented as a list of sites as opposed to URLs, which is probably because of their relationship with www.coolsites.net.
Only one page per directory may be entered
Help at http://www.topclick.com/search_tips_basic.html
Advanced search help is at http://www.topclick.com/search_tips_advanced.html.
Being Google-based this isn't too advanced, although this page is slightly more helpful than I remember Google's being.Add URL at http://www.topclick.com/add_url.html, although this is presumably
just a front for Google.
This Google-powered site claims to be the world's first "private" search engine. They claim to use no cookies to monitor your behaviour, and they show no banner ads that might slow things down. They back this up with one of the longer privacy policy pages I've seen.Then again, neither does Google.
Advanced search is at http://www.voila.fr/sop?refine=ok&lg=UK. (This
is the UK version).Help is at http://www.voila.com/Informations/
Add your URL at http://www.voila.com/Info/addsite.html. Submissions are
acknowledged by an email that gives you a reference number.A french-based search engine available in several regional (mostly European) variants, the above is the English speaking version. The French version offers 5 million french pages indexed in addition to the 50 millions world wide pages.
No advanced search
No Help
Add URL at http://www.webcrawler.com/info/add_url/Webcrawler would appear to be based on Excite, but without using the same database.
No advanced search or help pages that I could find.
Add URL at http://www.whatUseek.com/noshock/addurl-tableset.shtmlThis Shockwave-enhanced portal site came up near-empty on the test searches I tried. Uses Thunderstone technology.
![[New]](new.gif){kind=small}
Add (create account) at http://www.crosslinkz.com/se/add.shtml
No Help
No advanced searchVery small pay-for-listing site that seems to contain only paid for listings (unlike goto.com, which is backed up by traditional search results). Listings are added to categories and results show matching categories as well as individual pages. For simple searches the list of categories can be rather large. When I tried this site it wouldn't display in Netscape due to a HTML table coding error.
Help at http://www.findwhat.com/static/help_search.html
No advanced search
No add URL page, but you can "promote your site" (i.e. buy clicks) by visiting http://www.findwhat.com/static/ab_promote.htmlThis site follows on from goto.com's example of allowing people to buy their way to the top of the ratings. As such the site offers various promotional and affiliate service links, and even had a lottery graphic on the front page.
Powered by Inktomi.
No Advanced Help
Help is at http://iwww.goto.com/d/about/
"Promote your site" is at http://iwww.goto.com/d/about/advertisers/ and costs from $25.The first search engine where you can "buy" prominence on the results list, although they do also spider the web. This essentially perverts the use of search engines (IMHO), but is the way that even AltaVista is going (although AV eventually dropped this).
Seems to have a nasty way of truncating descriptio...
Has since inspired a number of copycat sites.
No Help (for searching)
Add listing at http://www.hootingowl.com/directory_faq.cfm?u=0000000
About at http://www.hootingowl.com/1how_to_list.cfm?u=0000000A search engine that lists paid-for results first. The search engine looks like a meta search, but in fact only AltaVista results were listed in the searches I tried.
Accounts start at $100, directory is ODP-based. Account gets one primary keyword, to which you can add 4 more key phrases to direct traffic to one URL (Which seems pretty restrictive to me)
Unlike other engines you're paying for placement, and not per-click. As far as I can tell the placements are permanent.
No Help
Add listings at https://safe.kanoodle.com/client_services/listings/
About at http://www.kanoodle.com/about/about.html
Sign up at https://safe.kanoodle.com:8443/signup.jhtmlStyling itself as a B2B e-commerce site. You can sign up for as little as $25.
No help.
No advanced search.
List your site at http://www.bay9.com/enter.cgi?link=&clicktrade=
Sign up at http://www.bay9.com/cgi-local/step1.cgi?link=&clicktrade=A pay-for-clicks search engine that seems to take results from other pay-for-click engines such as goto.com. Some of the "results" are annoyingly generated from the search phrase e.g.
'before you search for "<search phrase>" visit bingo.com'
Which seems to miss the point of searching in the first place. The fisrt of these takes you to their auction site. This site seems to have got the balance seriously wrong between providing search results and adverts.
Help at http://www.searchcactus.com/tips.asp
Promote your site at http://www.searchcactus.com/advertiser/
FAQ at http://www.searchcactus.com/advertiser/faq.aspA pay-for-clicks search engine that uses Google to back up its results, and adds in Ask Jeeves sponsored text adverts.
No help.
Submit URL at http://www.searchhound.com/Pages/submit.htm, guidelines are
at http://www.searchhound.com/cgi-bin/sh_acc_pages.cgi?../Pages/guidelines.htm Make bids at https://www.searchhound.com/Pages/bids.htmA pay-for-clicks search engine that only shows 5 results per page, and displays the requested page in a frame with their banner at the top. Seems to rank bidded terms first, followed by some form of results from Yahoo. Results are "Ranked by Neural Network Intelligence", so maybe they improve over time :-)
OTOH, the submission guidelines clearly state that the ranking is random unless you place a bid.
No help.
No advanced search.
Promote your site at http://sprinks.about.com/Shows 20 results per page. Powered by Inktomi. Quite a nice, fast site that shows related search terms in the lefthand margin, and usefully adds it's search box to each of its pages.
Meta search engines send off requests to several other search engines, the idea being to collate the results in a way that lends significance to the top few suggestions. As such, there is more variation in how they collate results and offer follow up options.
Such sites tend not to offer advanced search options (because that would complicate forwarding the request), and they often only show one page of results (because tracking the next page options would be difficult) They would argue that only the results returned by many engines should count. This is true for some searches, not for others.
Meta search engines are appearing at a greater rate than "proper" search engines, so the following is just a sample.
No advanced search page, but then the whole site is intended as an advance search engine.
Help is at http://www.askjeeves.com/docs/help.html
URLs should be submitted via email (see the help page)Ask Jeeves suggests you enter your question in English. This is not only turned into searches at the major engines (the standard metacrawler functionality), but is also re-phrased as alternative or related questions which you can then search on.
Quite a nice idea for those who aren't sure what to ask for.
Help at http://www.c4.com/help.html
No Advanced search, although there is "custom" search for registered users "Get listed" at http://www.c4.com/listed.htmlOffers Smarter, faster or custom searches. You can register with C4 to bookmark your favourite searches. Results show little graphics of the search engine they came from. Quite pretty, but it'll delay your first search ever-so-slightly.
I couldn't see an advanced search option.
Help is at http://www.dogpile.com/notes.html
There is no "add URL" option.One of the more popular meta search engines. You can choose to search other resources above and beyond the web, e.g. FTP, Quotes, Business news etc.
No advanced search or help.
Add URL at http://www.ineedhits.com/add-it/pro/, but this is in fact
an advert for a submission engine.This site seems to be more of an advert for other things (see the comment above on the "submit" option). That said, they collate the results in a rather nice fashion, and seem to give quite a relevant combination of results, with only those results coming from Excite alone showing the usual "why was that listed?" behaviour
In particular they seem to avoid listing 20 pages at the same site, which is a refreshing change.
Bizarrely this has a "best viewed in Verdana font" logo (ahem).
No help
No Advanced search.
No Add URLA portal that offers a fairly standard meta search engine. A "Search options" link takes you to foot of results pages where you can choose which search engines to use, although goto.com and findwhat.com are always listed first, presumably because it picks up credit from these pay-for-click sites for doing so.
No Help.
No Advanced search.
No Add URL.
No good (IMHO)This appears to be a portal with a tagged-on meta search engine.
You have the option to disable a pop-up window when you first visit (via a cookie). Not a good start for a search engine in my opinion.
It gets worse... this site didn't work with Netscape 4.7 when I tried it. Probably due to an unterminated <TABLE> tag (this often trips up Netscape).
More features and description at http://www.idexer.com/idexer.htm
No Advanced search
No Add URLLess of a meta engine, more of a front end to your engine of choice. Enter your search term and select the search engine you want to use. This can be useful, for example, to get 50 results from Altavista instead of the usual 10.
No Add URL
FAQ at http://www.infozoid.com/info/faq.html
No Advanced search.Tidy and fast meta search that also offers UseNet and FTP search as well searches in other languages. Intelligently, the choice of search engines varies as the language selected is changed (e.g. Acoon and Euroseek are included when German is selected)
Power search described at http://ixquick.com/power_search_techniques.htm
Add ixquick to your site at http://ixquick.com/sws_link_instructions.htmThis site has a number of nice features. It adds stars to indicate the quality of the results, lists the engines it used at the ranking found (top 10 results only), and it claims to be more intelligent in it's use of the major search engines. So, for example, it will allow requests with logical operators and wildcards to be submitted, translating these into the appropriate requests for each engine. Particularly welcome is the support for wil*cards.
It also seems to have been authored by someone with a sense of humour (see the about page for example). Not that we let that influence us at all. Oh no.
No help page.
No advanced search.
No Add URL.Colourful site. Although it claims to search the search engines, the results seem biased to those from Goto (where pay-for-click applies), although no mention is made of this. Results page offers "most popular" (from DirectHit) and "directory" (ODP) searches, and quite a few other tie-ins are offered.
This would appear to also be www.go2net.com
Power search is at http://www.go2net.com/index_power.html
Search Tips are at http://www.go2net.com/help/faq/query.htmlMetacrawler submits queries to other search engines and collates the results, listing pages found at multiple sites first. As such it averages out the best and worst of searches. One nice feature is that it spots pages with different case sensitivity as being the same page.
The power search actually has a fair degree of flexibility (for example you can choose which other search engine you want to use).
About at http://www.metaiq.com/link.html
No Add URL
No HelpMeta search that includes a number of pay-per-click engines in its results (although you can choose the mix yourself). This site seems to be related to the guide-based site www.about.com, and looks to be
offering a number of portal-like services based round the meta search engine.
Help is at http://www.multimeta.com/faq.htm
Add URL (to 20 engines) at http://multimeta.com/submit/submit.cgi
Register for email searched at http://www.multimeta.com/members/whyregister.htmA clean and simple search engine that serves up results from around 10 major engines. The site has a very slight German bias (you can search the German Yahoo as one of your 10 engines), and there is a German version of the site at www.multimeta.de, suggesting I suppose, that it is German owned,
not that you can tell otherwise.
Help is at http://www.newsindex.com/shelp.html
No advanced searchA search engine that searches a variety of news sources. A powerful way of keeping up to date with current affairs. Various forms of this resource can be added to your own pages.
Help is at http://www.quickbrowse.com/help/gettingstarted.html
Their story is at http://www.quickbrowse.com/story/
No advanced search
No add URLMeta-search site that lets you choose your engine(s), and how many pages of results you want. The results seem to be the individual pages stuck together, complete with original banner ads. So you can use this to get 20 pages of results from Altavista in one go at the cost of having to wade through 20 sets of headers. A rather bemusing experience :-)
I couldn't find an advanced search or help page.
Submit (to many search engines) at http://www.savvysearch.com/submit
You can "snoop" on recent requests at http://www.savvysearch.com/snoopAnother meta-search engine with support for about 2 dozen languages The results page has an option to search more search engines.
No advanced search itself, but offers special pages for advanced searches at AltaVista, HotBot, InfoSeek, Microsoft (MSN), Lycos and Yahoo (which is a reasonable thing for a meta engine to do).
No help page.
Add URL at http://searchalot.com/addurl.htmA meta-search engine with a directory (probably ODP) attached. Also acts as an ISP and offers free email, and states that Searchalot sites will be ranked first in any searches that are performed.
No advanced search.
Help is at http://www.surfwax.com/help/tutorials/search.htm
Add URLAn interesting site that shows results in frames with tiny icons showing the source of the result. You can choose up to 200 results at a time or possibly more (using the "max" setting). The most intriguing feature on this site is the little green triangles next to the links.
Click on these to see a site summary on the right-hand frame. These summaries seem to be quite intelligently constructed by fetching the page in question, and show statistics, the META description, key points and related links. You really should have a look at this feature.
Advanced search is at http://www.TsunamiSearch.com/mp/search.cgi?aff=default&cat=1&dis=f&ds=1&qt=and&rps=10&sas=1&sc=&sid=985858221_4280&site=ww1&site=ww5&site=ww6&
No ADD URL
No HelpVery basic meta search engine whose "Search" button is labelled "Surf", probably to match the tsunami name. There's no choice of engines, number of results or anything else. Shows 20 results per page which seem to come from AllTheWeb, Yahoo and Webcrawler.
About at http://www.virtualfish.com/why_use_it.html
No Add URL
No HelpMeta search engine that allows you to display up to 100 results (50 is the default). There's no "next" function, but you can order results by search engine or relevancy.
No advanced search or help page.
Submit URLs at http://www.noimages.com/faq2.html, but to get a priority
listing you must add a reciprocal link to your site.Two meta-engines for the price of one. True to it's name the noimages site has no images - a truely wonderful idea for a search engine where speed is everything. It's possible to add this search engine to your own site via a HTML code fragment (that they provide).
"Search Thingy". Not so much a meta search engine, as a front end for a selection of search engines. You can select one from the list of around 10 major engines and submit your search to the engine selected. Using the Back button on your browser then allows you to submit the same search to a different engine.
With the growth of software downloads, mpegs and image exchange, search engines are increasingly offering "file finding" services. Many of the major search engines routinely offer such options form their main site. AltaVista in particular has created a number of innovative search engines (for example to find pictures "like" the one you've selected).
File finder search engines often prefer to locate files by crawling the web. As such you can't usually "submit" URLs to these sites.
FAQ at http://www.diggit.com/FAQ.html, tutorial at http://www.diggit.com/tutorial/index.html
Advanced search is at http://www.diggit.com/SMPdb?opt=
No Add URLDiggit is an image search site, which is backed up by a text-based meta search engine, making it a one-stop site. Images are matched by a combination of image name, parent URL, meta tags, alt tags or text on the same page. Results are shown as thumbnails, and each offers "similar" and "info" links. The "info" links leads to a page showing details of the original image, together with related text search results. A pop-up window offers a tutorial when you first visit the site.
Couldn't see any help.
Advanced searches at http://lycospro.lycos.com/
No Add URL.This site helps you locate downloads by name. You can search for .zip files, mpegs etc. The advanced search offers options to find books and much more. Powered by Fast.
About is http://www.singingfish.com/about.html
Submit URL at http://www.singingfish.com/add.htmlAttractive looking site that claims to be building a large multimedia search engine to produce a feed for InfoSpace’s Web-based metasearch services, including Go2Net.com, Dogpile and MetaCrawler.
I couldn't actually find somewhere to search, but I suspect it's opening in early 2001.
About is at http://www.aesop.com/about.htm
Add URL is at http://www.aesop.com/cgi-bin/sub/submiturl.cgi
Read about the AESOP META tag at http://www.aesop.com/metatag.htmSearch engine that has the novel approach of inventing it's own META tag to help characterise your page. When you submit a URL they take you through a dialog asking about your site and then tell you the META tags to add. It's not clear if only pages that add this tag will be added. If so, this site is npt long for this world. At present the database is quite small, although I have seen them spidering sites.
About is http://www.allthesites.com/aboutus.htm
Submit URL at http://www.allthesites.com/submit.htm
Advanced search at http://www.allthesites.com/advanced/search.asp
Help is at http://www.allthesites.com/searchhelp.htmThis seems to be a fairly basic B2B re-badging of www.alltheweb.com. As with
that site this is a fast and comprehensive search engine,
Help ia http://www.directhit.com/help/
Add URL at http://www.directhit.com/util/addurl.html
Advanced search at http://www.directhit.com/AdvancedSearch.asp
About is at http://www.directhit.com/about/index.htmlThis search engine shows the 10 most popular links selected in response to search enquiries. You type in your query and the (up to 10) most popular selected links are displayed. Related queries are also shown. One problem is that not all queries give results.
Statistics are gathered by monitoring click-throughs at search engines such as HotBot. DirectHit seems to be offering itself as a service to these search engines.
No Help.
Add URL is a Javascript-invoked pop-up
About is at http://www.findanything.com/AboutYet another "next generation" search engine. This one allows you to rate your results from Excellent to Poor, although you need to supply an email address for the privilege. My results were mixed.
Only 10 results per page, with no indication of how many results have been found in total.
Help at http://findia.net/help.html
Intentionally minimalist engine that allows various types of searches (Mp3 etc). The results page includes links to www.changedetection.com which
will report via email when the selected pages are updated. 20 results per page, with no indication of the total number of matches found.
No help.
Become an editor at http://www.hotrate.com/suggestURL.asp
Add URL at http://www.hotrate.com/SuggestURL3.asp
About at http://www.hotrate.com/about.aspClaiming to be based "on second generation self-teaching search technology" and as a result they don't need to have a "next 20" button. A more honest opinion might be the software would be too hard to write.
The 20 results consist of - in order - a mixture of sponsored links, directory listings and then Google-based search results. The sponsored links are shown clearly in a box, and the directory listings have "opinions" logged against them.
The directory is maintained by editors and reviewers who seem to be able to earn commission through referrals.
Help (requires Flash) is at http://www.ilor.com/ILSFlash.htm, About is at http://www.ilor.com/ILSAbout.htm
FAQ at http://www.ilor.com/ILSFAQ.htm
Advanced search at http://www.ilor.com/searchilor.lor?&start=0&pg=aq&as_q=
No add URLA "Research" search engine that adds value to Google (itself a vary valuable engine). Each result gets links to a cached version, similar pages, and pages that link to the results page. A menu hovers over each result, which offers options like opening the result in another window, or to go to the result page and pop up a small window to take you back to the original results page. Another option opens a new window and adds links that you select to a list. The list can then be emailed to you, or added to your favourites.
The engine can be personalized (you can even choose your own skins). All in all an interesting experiment in using the hidden "features" in Google and modern browsers to extend the traditional search engine interface and the way users use and interact with results.
A new "Inference engine" that claims to be a bit smarter in working out what's relevant. Groups results by the type of page (commercial etc)
Uniquely (at the time of first writing this) you can specify how many seconds you're prepared to wait for the results.
One to watch!
Advanced search at http://www.iwon.com/home/search/search_advanced/0,11749,0,00.html
No add URL that I could see.
No Help page, but read more about the sweepstake at
http://www.iwon.com/home/winning/howitworks_overview/1,11933,,00.htmlPowered by Inktomi, this is easily the most bizarre portal/search engine around. Each part of the web page has a little orange mark next to it with a number. If you register with the site then these numbers add up to give you chances in a daily sweepstake! This would appear to be worth $10,000 daily until 31 March 2000.
The numbers are quite distracting and seduce you away from the results you were originally seeking.
No advanced search.
No add URL
Help is at http://www.links2go.com/help
About is at http://www.links2go.com/aboutA site that ranks sites according to their link popularity. Results are shown in an interesting tree format, grouping results together, and the most popular results are numbered. The trees are coloured showing separately the links between related topics and individual sites. This makes it easy to refine your search by searching for a more appropriate topic.
The site also allows discussion groups to form around the major topics,
No Advanced search.
No Help.
No Add URL.A simple and fast search engine. Results are fairly comprehensive (reminiscent of the old AltaVista) and presented in pages of 25 with only a "Next" option at the end. The site offers an Affiliate program which pays people referring users to the site (I've not signed up BTW). They plan to extend this to cover pay for clicks in 2001.
Search tips at http://www.oingo.com/find.dll?s=&r=y&m=&x=25&y=17#
Add URL at http://www.oingo.com/addsite.html, although really you can only add
by entering your site into the Open Directory project at http://dmoz.org/Help is at http://www.oingo.com/help.html
Oingo are demonstrating their "Meaning based search" products. Searches are preformed against web pages and a "meaning based search" is performed against the sites listed in the Open Directory Project (ODP). The results from the ODP seem to be high quality (but then the ODP is a fairly high-quality set of sites to start with).
Add URL at http://www.searchit.com/addurl.htm
No advanced search.
No help.Small and cheerful search engine.
Edit a site at http://search.thunderstone.com/texis/modify/modify.html
Read about it at http://search.thunderstone.com/texis/websearch/about.htmlAlthough referenced by www.metacrawler.com, this site appears to have a
small index at present. You can edit your site's entry only if you can receive mail as "webmaster".
Add URL at http://www.slider.com/addurl.htm
Help at http://www.slider.com/help.htm (though there's not much there)
No Advanced search.
Encyclopedia is at http://www.slider.com/index/indexaa.htmA clean looking site that styles itself as a "Free Encyclopedia and Search Engine". In addition to the more traditional search results, backed up by ODP listings you can search through the alphabetical index of the encyclopedia. The Add URL link lists a number of submission tools they accept listing from, but bizarrely doesn't allow manual submission.
Add a page at http://www.subjex.com/addapage.html
Read about it at http://www.subjex.com/about.html
No help (which is a shame)An interesting search engine that is "dialogue based" and which attempts to be conversational (for example I got greeted with a "My! you're up late!" when I tested it). Frustratingly limited to 5 results a page (more can be viewed), but this is presumably because the engine is aimed at tailoring your search for the right page through dialogue
You get best results if you enter short answers. Enter a long question and you'll get 5 results, enter short questions and you're more likely to be directed to what you want.
You need to reset the dialogue each time you start a new search, although this would appear to be the same as typing "reset" in the query box. Equally adding the word "find" to the start of the first query can shorten the initial dialogue. Same with "find program" if you're looking for software
Here's a sample dialogue
Winzip
> Would you like me to search for winzip?
(the above isn't asked if you start with "find winzip" or "find program winzip")
Yes
> Here are some results. Should I look for 2000 or Winzip computing
> or something else.
Something else
> What specific information about Winzip do you require?
Download sitesIn fact most of the links before this point would have done fine. The whole experience is a little Eliza-like, and I couldn't resist trying the following.
"Open the pod bay doors, Hal"
and it found me 5 pages, 4 of which had this as their title, so no complaints there.
An interesting technology that may play well with the less experienced web searcher.
Help is at http://www.teoma.com/help.html
No Advanced Search
No Add URLJust entering beta in June 2001, this is another stripped down search engine. The results come in three parts, web pages, web pages grouped by topic, and "expert links". The same groups and expert links are shown on subsequent pages of results.
Customized search available.
Help available.
FAQ at http://vivisimo.com/vivisimo-1.1/html/FAQ.htmlInteresting meta that describes itself as a "clustering engine" and which shows results in a set of frames, with listings on the right and a tree of related search terms and results on the left. Due for launch in Feb 2001 according to the FAQ.
Note the Help and "Customize" links work within the FRAMES setup of the site and as such I can't really quote them here.
No advanced search.
Help and more about WebBrain at http://www.webbrain.com/about_frame.html
Add URL is the ODP page http://dmoz.org/add.htmlAn innovative site (when viewed in IE) as the results pages are interpreted with eye-catching animated graphics, which group the results together.
The results (currently) seem to limited to the contents of the Open Directory Project.
No advanced search
No submit URL
About at http://direct.webhelp.com/direct/html/aboutDirect.html
FAQ at http://www.webhelp.com/webhelp/faq/faq_company.htmlAnother interesting site that appears to be extending the Ask Jeeves approach to a pay-as-you-ask system, based on questions asked of human experts who will reply with a URL that can help, rather than a direct answer.
With the free service you ask natural text questions, and the results are a mixture of responses to previously asked questions, matches from some pay-per-click engines and the ODP.
If you sign up for $9.99 you can ask questions for a month of the human experts (whose answers are the ones searched above), or ask 10 questions over an extended period.
No Advanced search
No Help
Add URL at http://www.webzone.com/isn/addurl.htmlA fairly straightforward search engine that lists the date the link was last validated (mostly 6 months old when I checked)
WiseSearch at http://www.wisenut.com/WISEsearch.html
About is at http://www.wisenut.com/company.html
No Add URL as yet.New search engine as of May 2001. A simple site design like Google, and a database claimed to be larger than Google shows what they're aiming at. The site boasts new technology, and offers a WiseGuide, which categorises some of the results, allowing you to browse the results as if they were a directory.
FAQ and help https://security.publicate.com/wordpond/faq.asp
This site executes a sample search whenever you connect to it. According to WordPond
"WordPond is designed to maximize the number of search results available on a single page. WordPond delivers a sample search to give the new visitor an idea of the utility of hundreds of results delivered as single line records in a graphic free format."
Certainly, very little is displayed apart from results, and WordPond can be customized to deliver up to a thousand records per page in an ad free format.
Webmasters pay a one off $5 and can then register as many sites as they wish, allocating each keyword combination "word pennies" which weight the sites ranking against search terms.
Search tips at http://search.about.com/scripts/Query70.asp?PM=112_410_T&faq=yes&COB=home
The "Mining co" recently renamed "About.com". This site uses a number of human "guides" to direct you to URLs and news on a variety of subject areas.
The search is AltaVista based
About SEARCH.COM is at http://search.cnet.com/About/0,69,0,0200.html
and explains the search services available with linksThis is C|Net's search engine portal. In fact the search appears to simply be InfoSeek with a C|Net front on it. Visit the above URL to access other search services available though this site (powered by Download.com, Snap! and others)
Help is at http://dmoz.org/searchguide.html
Add URL is at http://dmoz.org/add.html, but you're best of identifying
your category first.This "open directory project" (ODP) is a "spin off" (or more of a kindred spirit) from Mozilla, Netscape's open-source project.
The directory is maintained on a voluntary basis, with each directory being adopted by one or more "Editors". If you want a new category, become an Editor.
This approach means the directory is kept useful, but more importantly can accept new submissions quite rapidly due to the large review staff.
Potentially this "open" approach could give Yahoo a run for their money.
[update May 2000] In fact the ODP has since been adopted by a number of portal sites as their "directory" service, and some search engines give priority to sites listed in the ODP.
About at http://www.indya.com/aboutus/index.html
Although Indya.com claims to be a portal for Indians serving the needs of the Indian Diaspora, in fact there is very little obvious Indian bias on AltaVista-basedc search engine and its attached directory.
Results are headed by directory listings and results from Indya's own channels.
A directory from the people that gave you AltaVista, so the "search" part is really just AltaVista, although it does search the LookSmart directory as well.
The directory is fairly extensive, if a little slow to navigate. The directory has grown in popularity (and is now used by several search engines to boost ranking). A fee of $199 will ensure your submission is looked at early. It doesn't guarantee an inclusion though.
No advanced search or help that I could find. The search option defaults to searching netfind.com (which is what I guess it's there for)
Submit a site at http://www.netguide.com/aboutus/aboutreviews.html,
although the actual submission process is via email. The submission is for inclusion in their directories.
Netscape's popular portal site (popular if only because all copies of Communicator easily point to it). You can elect to search using a number of directories. The current default is Snap, which is powered by Inktomi.
Options page is at http://search.yahoo.com/search/options
Help page is at http://www.yahoo.com/docs/info/help.html, with search
options further down the page.Advanced tips are at http://search.yahoo.com/search/syntax (and take some
finding).Adding a URL to yahoo is a career move. Life's too short to document the process here, and it's not just a simple URL.
Yahoo is the grandaddy of all directories. A hand-crafted index that is still the most popular. This hand-crafting means that most sites (mine included) are not listed in the index, so they can't claim to be comprehensive or up to date (bitter, moi?).However they also have a search engine. Searches start in Yahoo, but if and when that fails a more general web search is carried out.
The engine used to be AltaVista based (which was nice, as you could view more than 10 results/page), then changed to Inktomi (bah!) and then to google (hurrah!)
(STOP PRESS: I did finally get my site listed after one and a half years of effort. Of course by that time my site had moved. Happily I was able to get the URL changed quite easily).
I couldn't find an advanced search option.
Search tip is at http://www.aol.com/netfind/tips/home.html
Add your site at http://www.aol.com/netfind/info/addyoursite.htmlAOL's search engine. Used by AOL's many millions of users. Powered by Excite it says, so it's about as useful, although again the database of pages appears different.
Has a useful "view results by website" option.
Search tips at http://www.nbci.com/LMOID/resource/0,566,home-136,00.html?fd.srch.tip
Power search at http://www.nbci.com/search/power/form/0,179,home-0,00.html?fd.srch.pwr
Add URL at http://www.nbci.com/LMOID/resource/0,566,home-1077,00.html?st.sn.ft.0.surl
Directory is at http://www.nbci.com/dir/0,668,home-0,00.htmlInktomi results, headed by NBCI's directory listings (see the directory URL above). The results from the directory often appear only loosly related to the search term, so if you include a word like "HTML" in your search you get a long list of directory listed software ahead of the search engine results. NBCI seems to be a portal site, the about page styles itself as an "Internet media company", which seems fair enough given its heritage.
No help on the search function as such.
Advanced search at http://search.btinternet.com/default.asp?act.advancedQuery=1&
No add URL.Very sparse search function, but with reasonable advanced search. Reports mirror sites, but in the tests I did it wrongly reported similar pages as mirror sites, when they were, in fact, different pages in the same documentation set.
Help at http://www.compuserve.com/compuserve/search_landing.asp
No Add URL page.
No advanced search.(a.k.a http://websearch.cs.com/)
One of the oldest ISPs (indeed it was around before the term ISP was invented). Results list "premium web sites" before listing the more traditional, and extensive, results. Powered by Inktomi.
The results pages offer an option to show Compuserve results only.
Geocities is one of the major "free web space" providers. They have a search engine that allows you to search their member pages. Often these pages are not listed in the other major search engines.
Help is at http://search.icq.com/help/
Submit URL at http://search.icq.com/default.asp?act.addurl=addurlNot strictly an ISP, ICQ is used by millions of people worldwide. The search results include an option to visit the links chosen by other ICQ members, although this would appear to not in relation to your particular keywords. Options include searching for other ICQ members who share the same interests, and to execute popular related searches.
Advanced search at http://search.msn.com/advanced.asp
Advanced help is at http://search.msn.com/helpadv.htm
Submit URL at http://search.msn.com/addurl.asp, but you're limited to
only one URL per site per day.The Microsoft ISP search engine. Regional alternatives are available.
The "advanced search" takes you to Snap!, and doesn't offer the ability to limit your search to xoom sites.
Search tips is at http://xoom.snap.com/main/help/item/0,11,-6736,00.html?tt.xm.sb.0.tips
The search engine would appear to be powered by Snap!/Inktomi. There's no "next page" option, so set the number of results wanted before you search. Annoyingly this gets reset to 10 each time.
As JafSoft are based in the UK, we keep a list of UK-based search engines. Several of the major search engines and directories offer regional variations (Excite, Yahoo, Lycos etc), but we don't list those here.
No advanced search page.
Search tips at http://www.askalex.co.uk/tips1.htm, although there
appear to be different URLs for different sites using the service, making it look more like the calling site's help files.Submit details at
http://askalex.co.uk/scripts/getform.exe?par?submit.htm?1
AskAlex is a UK business directory. You can list your details for free, but it'll cost £100 to get email and http links added. The directory is linked to by a number of major portal sites (AOL, FreeServe etc).
No advanced search option, but help on advanced searches can be found at http://www.mirago.co.uk/scripts/longhelp.asp
Basic help at http://www.mirago.co.uk/scripts/srchhelp.asp
Add a URL at http://www.mirago.co.uk/scripts/addsite.aspA UK-based portal with a search engine that claims to re-index it's 7,000,000 pages every 2-3 weeks. One interesting feature is the way this site easily exposes other sites linked to and from the pages found. This is usually an advanced option on those engines that support it.
Submit only a single URL (which will be crawled), and any non-index page will raise an alarm forcing manual checking for appropriateness.
No advanced search.
Help is at http://www.scoot.co.uk/help/help.asp
Add URL at http://www.scoot.co.uk/submit/index.aspA yellow pages type site that allows search by category and region within the UK. Useful for finding cinemas in Portsmouth etc.
Advanced help is at http://www.searchuk.com/help/advanced.html
Add URL at http://www.searchuk.com/addurl.htmlIntelli-search option is at http://www.searchuk.com/cgi-bin/i-search.cgi
and appears on your search results page.A meta-search option is at http://www.searchuk.com/cgi-bin/meta.cgi
and appears on your search results page
This seems to be a nicely-featured search engine. One to watch!
Advanced search at http://www.selu.co.uk/adv_search.html
No Help
Add URL page at http://www.selu.co.uk/links.htmlVery much a UK-only site, with the advanced search allowing search by county. Seems to have a small database, limited to links directly added into the site.
The above URLs are intended for display inside FRAMES, so to get the full effect, visit the main URL and click on "search" or "add URL".
No advanced search (searches are pretty constrained)
Help is at http://www.thomson-directories.co.uk/content/products/contact.htm
(although I couldn't get it when I tried)No Add URL page
Thompson directory of UK businesses. A rival to the more traditional yellow pages.
No advanced search
No help
Add URL at http://www.ukdirectory.co.uk/addurl.htmlUK-based directory. The site offers alphabetic lists of sites and categories.
No advanced search
No help
Add URL at http://www.ukindex.co.uk/urlreg.htmUK-only index. Site seems to have quite a small index, and wasn't accepting any new submissions when I checked. I got a server error on one of my searches, and a 404 error when I tried to access the help page. Not a good impression overall.
Advanced search at http://www.ukmax.com/search/, although it's not
that advanced.Add URL at http://www.ukmax.com/search/default.asp?act.addurl.x=0&act.addurl.y=0
No search help that I could find.
This seems to be (Jan '99) a newish site, and is quite a lively UK_based portal site.Search engine is powered by Inktomi, the same engine (I believe) as Hotbot.
Advanced search at http://www.ukplus.com/html/options.html
Add a site at http://www.ukplus.com/ukplus/owa/pkg_suggest.p_ad_url
Advanced search at http://www.uksearcher.co.uk/cgi-bin/search.pl?action=powersearch
Add URL at http://www.uksearcher.co.uk/cgi-bin/search.pl?action=addurl
Help at http://www.uksearcher.co.uk/cgi-bin/search.pl?action=tipsI had great difficulty accessing this site in Netscape 4.x. Some searches produced questionable results, but the power search has a "family filter" that you may want to use.
One nice feature is that submitted URLs appear almost immediately in the index
Advanced search at http://uk.searchengine.com/english/advanced/index.cgi
Help is at http://www.searchengine.com/english/help/index.cgi
Add a URL at http://url.searchengine.com/index.cgi
UK search engine which puts out way too much vertical white space in its results. However you can elect to have results shown in a pop-up list form which is much more compact (although it then omits the descriptions).
Advanced search at http://sparksearch.com/search/advanced.html (but it's not very)
No help.
Add URL at http://sparksearch.com/go/add/Quite nippy UK-based site that serves up a comprehensive set of results. You can put searches in quotes, but annoyingly these get stripped off on the results pages, making page 2 come from a different set of results.
Strangely there seems no way of limiting the results to have a UK bias. The UK bias is evident in the other services available from the home page (news etc).
No advanced search (searches are pretty constrained).
No Help page.
No Add URL page.UK business yellow pages. Search by specifying a who, what, where type query. Not a search engine as such.
No advanced search option.
No help page.
No add URL page.A UK portal site with news, weather and other services including access to the "AskAlex" business directory. The search is based on the UK variants of other search engines.
There would appear to be no advanced search option.
No help page
No longer any add URL page.
White paper at http://www.webtop.com/search/topferret/wpaper.htm(Previously www.euroferret.com).
A Europe-based search engine which, as you'd expect, offers decent multi-lingual support. The Muscat spider is a fairly active visitor to our site. Recently Euroferret became WebTop, at which point the tips page and add URL pages disappeared
You can refine your search using suggested keywords.
The results, however, seem to be listed at random as usual for a site powered by Excite.
Occasionally we encounter other regional search engines, usually because they start crawling our site (itself a measure of their quality). Many of the portal sites like Yahoo and Lycos have regional sites.
A French portal site with a fairly comprehensive search engine (powered by ECHO). An English version is at www.voila.com
My thanks to Erica Brewer for the list of Australian search engines.
There is frames-based site listing a large number of international search engines at
http://www.twics.com/~takakuwa/search/search.html. This site displays the logos (as
links) of each engine by country, making some of the pages a bit slow to load.
There is also http://www.searchenginecolossus.com/ which claims to list engines at
149 countries round the world. Again it displays logos.
An Arabic portal that offers English to Arabic translation.
Babelfish is the granddaddy of on-line translation. Named after the Douglas Adams Sci-Fi creation, Bablefish offers an impressive range of Oriental and European languages. The Bablefish service is available as a "Translate this" option on any AltaVista-based search. English and Arabic interfaces are available, but when I tried a translation from the English interface it gave a JavaScript error.
You cabn translate an entered URL between major languages. Any links you follow can also be translated. There's a limit to how much can be translated on any given page though.
Google offers machine translation of your search results. You need to enable this option in your preferences. Under preferences you can also choose your preserred language for the Google Interface.
A site that offers English to Russian machine translation (and vice versa)
A site dedicated to all aspects of promoting web sites, with a sizable section on search engines. Articles include use of keywords, link popularity and much more.
The Informant monitors the major search engines, and sends you email whenever new pages matching your search are detected.
Like the Informant, this service will email you updates when new sites related to your search term appear in the search engines. The base service is free, but more extensive services are available for a monthly fee. I've not tried this, so I can't vouch for the results.
A site that publishes a subscription-only electronic magazine in PDF format dedicated to the topic of Internet businesses. The site also offers a number of free resources, amongst which is "Mother of all search engine reference books" - an e-book that is available as a PDF download (around 0.5 Mb).
The book covers a variety of search-engine related topics in a nice, consise manner that is easy to read. It is full of useful URLs linking to further articles, useful tools and, of course, this page itself. The book is updated preiodically, and you can sign up for updates via a mailing list.
This site is run by the people at www.virtualpromote.com (itself a
useful reference if you want to build site traffic). These forums are dedicated to discussing how to get your web pages listed and ranked in each of the search engines. An excellent place to lurk and find out what's going on with the major search engines.
Formerly called "A Webmaster's Guide To Search Engines" that's pretty much what this is. This site contains tips on how to use engines, how to submit to engines, and what is the current health of the major search engines.
A site dedicated to the topic of how to get the most of your submissions to search engines. Pages discus topics like using Titles and keywords, doorways and gateways and much more. Quite a good introduction to the terminology of search engine submission.
Proclaiming itself as the "Portal Portal", this site offers news and articles on various search engines and portal subjects, and offers a weekly newsletter. The articles are drawn from a number of sources, cover interesting and thought-provoking topics, and are well written. They also have a set of forums, although these are naturally less active than those at dedicated forum sites.
A discussion site with many forums dedicated to topics of interest to webmasters. It includes forums on a number of search engine topics. Forums range from discussing how to get listed in particular search engines, to identifying spiders and webbots that come visiting your site.
A very comprehensive list of sites, broken down into categories. Also lists auction sites and the like. You can't actually search from this site, but it will lead you to just the right search engine for locating the type of item you're interested in.
I've resisted the urge to copy all their links to this page :-)
Nice overview of the main engines, with good descriptions of their background and history.
List of search engines with an educational bias. Identifies which sites are filtered for content.
This site is produced (apparently) by 6 people at the Oakton Community College Library. In addition to have a number of quality link lists on several topics (including search engines), they offer a more tutorial based approach, explaining how to get the most out of the links they offer.
Amazing what 6 people can do eh?
A large and comprehensive alphabetic listing of search engine and directory sites. A bit slow to draw as each page is placed inside a single large table. The list simply contains links to each engine, with the larger sites being shown in bold.
Here's some robots that we've spotted spidering our site;-
Originally spotted June 1999 as www.ip3000.com, at which time it
claimed"Internet Portal 3000" promises to be _the largest information and media search engine on the WEB with over 7,000,000 websites indexed including Europe and Asia.
The ip3000 site no longer exists, but it seems to be spidering on behalf of the PetersNews site which claims
We have over 15,000,000 websites indexed, including Europe and Asia
Which (on 22 Jan 2001) states that it will be ready in 30-60 days.
A picture indexing site claimin it will go live in Q2 2001.
An interesting Java-based site that allows members to place their sites geographically. You can search for a place or user name, and the the applet allows you to zoom into a location. Sites are show at hexagons on the map and details pop up in a window as you click on the hexagons. The applet shows where you are in the world, a map of the location, key locations and lets you calculate distances and the like.
We noticed this www.wordcrucher.com related site spidering our site,
and sure enough it's going to be a search engine.However, it's so new you can't even submit URLs yet :)
For (a little) more info, visit http://www.spyhop.com/about.html
(first spotted 14 Feb 2000)
Spotted visiting one of our pages. Nothing to see as yet except for the promise of a new search engine.
(first spotted 14 August 2000)
Nothing to see yet except a giraffe graphic and an "enter email address" box to receive notification.
This page is regularly converted from this text file by the author's
own text to HTML converter AscToHTM.
The last update was on 5-Jul-2001. This
software is available as shareware (cost $40)
This page is © 2000-2001 John A Fotheringham. It may not be
reproduced without permission,
although you are welcome to save a copy for personal use to your hard disk.
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