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Browse various search engines, as well as search news, and other resources.
List of search engines :
Internet search engines :
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AlltheWeb
AlltheWeb is an Internet search engine that
made its debut in mid-1999. It grew out of FTP Search, Tor Egge's doctorate
thesis at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, which he started
on in 1994, which in turn resulted in the formation of Fast Search and Transfer
established on July 16, 1997. It was used primarily as a show piece site for
FAST's enterprise search engine. Although rivaling Google in size and
technology, AlltheWeb never became as popular.
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AltaVista
AltaVista is a web search engine owned by
Yahoo!. AltaVista was once one of the most popular search engines but its
popularity has waned with the rise of Google.
AltaVista provides a free translation service, branded Babel Fish, which
automatically translates text between several languages. In May 2008, this
service was renamed Yahoo! Babel Fish, after the parent company.
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Ask.com
Ask.com (or Ask Jeeves in the United Kingdom)
is a search engine founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in
Berkeley, California. The original search engine software was implemented by
Gary Chevsky from his own design. Chevsky, Justin Grant, and others built the
early AskJeeves.com website around that core engine. Three venture capital
firms, Highland Capital Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, and The RODA
Group were early investors. Ask.com is currently owned by InterActiveCorp under
the NASDAQ symbol IACI.
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Bing (search engine)
Bing (formerly Live Search, Windows Live
Search, and MSN Search) is the current web search engine (advertised as a
"decision engine") from Microsoft. Bing was unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve
Ballmer on May 28, 2009 at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego. It
went fully online on June 3, 2009, with a preview version released on June 1,
2009.
Notable changes include the listing of search suggestions as queries are entered
and a list of related searches (called "Explorer pane") based on semantic
technology from Powerset that Microsoft purchased in 2008. As of January 2010
Bing is the third largest search engine on the web by query volume, at 3.16%,
after its competitor Google at 85.35% and Yahoo at 6.15%, according to Net
Applications.
On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would
power Yahoo! Search.
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ChaCha (search engine)
ChaCha is a mobile question answering service
which uses a technique known as the human search engine. ChaCha was created by
Scott A. Jones and Brad Bostic. The company is based in Carmel, Indiana, a
suburb of Indianapolis.
The name ChaCha comes from the Mandarin Chinese word, cha (simplified Chinese:
查; traditional Chinese: wikt:查; pinyin: chá; Wade-Giles: ch'a), which means "to
search."
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Google Search
Google Search or Google Web Search is a web
search engine owned by Google Inc. and is the most-used search engine on the
Web. Google receives several hundred million queries each day through its
various services. The main purpose of Google Search is to hunt for text in
webpages, as opposed to other data, such as with Google Image Search. Google
search was originally developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1997.
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Like.com
Like.com is a price comparison service website
that bills itself as a visual search engine for products.
Since launching, the website has only allowed users to search for jewelry,
handbags, shoes, and watches. Users can browse the website to find a product
that they are interested in, or one that looks similar to what they are looking
for. They can then choose to use the website to search its database for
similar-looking products. The website then returns the results with links to
retailers such as Amazon.com and Zappos. With the results, users can highlight
parts of a product image to find other products with similar patterns, shapes,
and colors. Each of the three criterion can be ranked to determine the
importance of each according to the user. Like.com is planning to allow users to
upload their own photos for the website to analyze and return similar-looking
products. They wish to also allow users to upload photos taken in places such as
stores with a mobile device, so that they can search for the product online at a
cheaper price.
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Mahalo.com
Mahalo.com is a web directory (or human search
engine) and knowledge exchange (question and answer site) launched in alpha test
in May 2007 by Jason Calacanis. As of January 2008, the project is in beta test.
It differentiates itself from algorithmic search engines like Google and Ask.com,
as well as other directory sites like DMOZ and Yahoo by tracking and building
hand-crafted result sets for many of the currently popular search terms. Mahalo
means "thank you" in Hawaiian.
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Picsearch
Picsearch is a Swedish company which develops
and provides image search, video search and audio search services for large
websites. The image search services developed and provided by Picsearch power
several major internet companies, such as Ask and Lycos. Other Picsearch
customers include regional search portals in Germany, Turkey and an Arabic
language portal. Customers outside the sphere of search portals include
telecoms, entertainment sites, e-commerce, sport websites, yellow pages and
communities.
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Simply Hired
Simply Hired is a vertical search engine
company based in Silicon Valley, and we're building the largest online database
of jobs on the planet. Our goal is to make finding your next job a simple yet
effective, enjoyable journey. We can't always promise you'll discover your dream
job, but we'll give you the best chance possible to get a bigger paycheck, a
more considerate boss, or a shorter commute.
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Yahoo! Search
Yahoo! Search is a web search engine, owned by
Yahoo! Inc. and was as of December 2009, the 2nd largest search engine on the
web by query volume, at 6.29%, after its competitor Google at 85.35% and before
Bing at 3.27%, according to Net Applications.
Originally, Yahoo! Search started as a web directory of other websites,
organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In the late
1990s, Yahoo! evolved into a full-fledged portal with a search interface and, by
2007, a limited version of selection-based search.
Yahoo! Search, originally referred to as Yahoo! provided Search interface, would
send queries to a searchable index of pages supplemented with its directory of
sites. The results were presented to the user under the Yahoo! brand.
Originally, none of the actual web crawling and storage/retrieval of data was
done by Yahoo! itself. In 2001 the searchable index was powered by Inktomi and
later was powered by Google until 2004, when Yahoo! Search became independent.
Yahoo! Search major competitors are: Google Search, Bing and Ask Search.
On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would
power Yahoo! Search.
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ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo is a vertical search engine focused on
people, companies, and the relationships among them.
Zoom Information Inc. was founded by Jonathan Stern in 2000 as Eliyon
Technologies. The company’s investors include Venrock Associates and Vulcan
Capital.
The site powers people searches for Amazon’s A9.com and Business Week. ZoomInfo
also allows users to collaborate in the construction of its content by
contributing information to their own profiles or building new ones where none
exists. Their database holds 45 million profiles of business professionals and 5
million company profiles.
The company draws around 4.5 million monthly users and generates circa $12
million in revenue from its fee-based and subscription services.
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Web search engine :
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A web search engine is
designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are
usually presented in a list of results and are commonly called hits. The
information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of
files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open
directories. Unlike Web directories, which are maintained by human editors,
search engines operate algorithmically or are a mixture of algorithmic and human
input.
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How web search engines work :
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A web search engine is
designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are
usually presented in a list of results and are commonly called hits. The
information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of
files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open
directories. Unlike Web directories, which are maintained by human editors,
search engines operate algorithmically or are a mixture of algorithmic and human
input.
A search engine operates, in the following order
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Web crawling
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Indexing
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Searching
Web search engines work by storing information about many web pages, which they
retrieve from the html itself. These pages are retrieved by a Web crawler
(sometimes also known as a spider) — an automated Web browser which follows
every link on the site. Exclusions can be made by the use of robots.txt. The
contents of each page are then analyzed to determine how it should be indexed
(for example, words are extracted from the titles, headings, or special fields
called meta tags). Data about web pages are stored in an index database for use
in later queries. A query can be a single word. The purpose of an index is to
allow information to be found as quickly as possible. Some search engines, such
as Google, store all or part of the source page (referred to as a cache) as well
as information about the web pages, whereas others, such as AltaVista, store
every word of every page they find. This cached page always holds the actual
search text since it is the one that was actually indexed, so it can be very
useful when the content of the current page has been updated and the search
terms are no longer in it. This problem might be considered to be a mild form of
linkrot, and Google's handling of it increases usability by satisfying user
expectations that the search terms will be on the returned webpage. This
satisfies the principle of least astonishment since the user normally expects
the search terms to be on the returned pages. Increased search relevance makes
these cached pages very useful, even beyond the fact that they may contain data
that may no longer be available elsewhere.
When a user enters a query into a search engine (typically by using key words),
the engine examines its index and provides a listing of best-matching web pages
according to its criteria, usually with a short summary containing the
document's title and sometimes parts of the text. The index is built from the
information stored with the data and the method by which the information is
indexed. Unfortunately, there is not one search engine that allows to search
documents by date. Most search engines support the use of the boolean operators
AND, OR and NOT to further specify the search query. Boolean operators are for
literal searches that allow the user to refine and extend the terms of the
search. The engine looks for the words or phrases exactly as entered. Some
search engines provide an advanced feature called proximity search which allows
users to define the distance between keywords. There is also concept-based
searching where the research involves using statistical analysis on pages
containing the words or phrases you search for. As well, natural language
queries allow the user to type a question in the same form one would ask it to a
human. A site like this would be ask.com.
The usefulness of a search engine depends on the relevance of the result set it
gives back. While there may be millions of web pages that include a particular
word or phrase, some pages may be more relevant, popular, or authoritative than
others. Most search engines employ methods to rank the results to provide the
"best" results first. How a search engine decides which pages are the best
matches, and what order the results should be shown in, varies widely from one
engine to another. The methods also change over time as Internet usage changes
and new techniques evolve. There are two main types of search engine that have
evolved: one is a system of predefined and hierarchically ordered keywords that
humans have programmed extensively. The other is a system that generates an
"inverted index" by analyzing texts it locates. This second form relies much
more heavily on the computer itself to do the bulk of the work.
Most Web search engines are commercial ventures supported by advertising revenue
and, as a result, some employ the practice of allowing advertisers to pay money
to have their listings ranked higher in search results. Those search engines
which do not accept money for their search engine results make money by running
search related ads alongside the regular search engine results. The search
engines make money every time someone clicks on one of these ads.
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