Search engines

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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.