Google.com uses sophisticated next-generation technology to produce the right results fast with every query. Google returns relevant results because it responds to your query using an automated method that ranks relevant websites based on the link structure of the Internet itself.
The askenvision.com "search site" feature seen above is powered by google technology.
Yahoo! is not so much a search engine, but a directory with over half a million sites divided into more than 25,000 categories. A Yahoo! search provides up to date relevant results due to the fact that each site listed has been filtered by humans.
Excite is one of the largest search engines in the world, with strategic partnerships such as Netscape and many other major internet players.
Ask Jeeves uses a series of questions to narrow down a search, then supplies an answer based on pre-prepared material.
GO TO prides itself on being a fast search engine, which is designed to return relevant searches.
AltaVista creates complete indexes of every word on every web page an newsgroup it encounters, allowing you to make highly targeted searches. AltaVista searches by keywords, which it derives from the text of a web page. Information is constantly updated and each page returned from the search is marked with AltaVista's most recent update.
Hotbot battles on and off with AltaVista as to which search engine carries the most pages; in any case, this is a monster search engine and one which, on the whole, returns very good results
LookSmart is growing into one of the major competitors to Yahoo! in the "reviewed sites" category. The LookSmart directory contains over a quarter of a million categorised sites.
MetaCrawler is a very elegant meta search engine that weighs results according to which search engine returns them, then ranks these results so that the most relevant appear at the top of the list.
WebCrawler is Excite in disguise; they share the same database, and although WebCrawler's search process has been tweaked very slightly, they essentially return the same results.
people seach
WhoWhere? was recently aquired by Lycos, and has gone through many changes including the addition of a portal. However, it still provides top-notch information for anyone looking for somebody online.
A directory developed by CNET, Snap is a mixture of site reviews, plugs for other CNET sites and heavily promoted links to content provided by Snap's partner sites. Although the depth of coverage is getting better, Snap has a long way to go to catch up to Yahoo or LookSmart.
