Learning About Search Engines - Topic 3 501

I must admit that that my repertoire of search engines that I use for research purposes exists with Google. There are so many more search engines than I had ever imagined. This topic has really expanded my knowledge and understanding to the extent and quality of information found by different search engines. There are different search engines for different purposes and there are even websites that allow you to the best search engine that best suits one's purpose - through Noodletools. I know know that the most effective search engine is one that fulfils the purpose and need of the research.

I will attempt to brainstorm some search engines off the top of my head - Yahoo, HotBot, Lycos, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves (alarming as I read only on the weekend some other search engines from Herring's Chapter 2).

I will now do a bit of Internet searching and see what other search engines I can come up with - new ones that I haven't heard of.

• Wolfram Alpha (I remember last week seeing this mentioned on OZTL_NET) http://www.wolframalpha.com/. I looked this site up and its FAQ and found out that the site is NOT a search engine. "It's a computational knowledge engine: it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links". The sites content is very much Maths and Science based.
• Bing http://www.bing.com/ replaces MSN Search and Live Search in June 2009 and is still in testing phase.
• Excite http://www.excite.com/ a very cluttered search engine with lots of advertising around the page
• All the Web http://www.alltheweb.com/ its index is provided by Yahoo and claims to be a powerful search engine allowing faster searches than other search engines with its "advanced search engine features".
• Gigablast (2002) http://www.gigablast.com/
• Exalead (2004) http://www.exalead.com/search

What I have learnt by surfing some of these search engines is that there is so many, it's really a challenge to know which one to search first when it comes time to decide which search engines to use. I will have to come back to this post at a later date when my knowledge of search engines becomes more concrete.