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The Best Search Engines & Top Search Sites
Search engines are giant databases of words, compiled and maintained around the clock by small computer programs called spiders, bots, or robots. These programs seek out and randomly crawl web pages, indexing their contents as they go. The information overload problem so typical of search engine use has to do with how these tools work. Net search engines are entirely automated, with no human intervention, which means that among the gigabytes of data they gather may be useful bits of information. The challenge is finding them! There are thousands of search engines on the Net. Some of the best known and most popular are listed below. Next time you're wondering which is the best search engine, give some of these a test drive. For how to use these resources, see our constructing a query page. For practice searching the Net with Google or other favourites, check out our fun Internet Hunt<
Reminder: There's more to search than Google! Metasearchers are useful when you're in a hurry, and web directories are helpful for locating quality sites by topic.
Search Engines
Google Bing Yahoo Duck Duck Go AskJeeves Mahalo IXQuick GigaBlast Teoma (good for jumplists) AOL Lycos MasterSitePaid Listings
Internet Search engines like Google and Bing use a variety of criteria to order results, including popularity and relevance. But the fact that a site is at the top of the results does not mean it's the best or most relevant resource. Some search engines accept payment for top position, utilizing a keyword bidding system and collecting a fee from advertisers when you click through to their sites. The more advertisers pay, the higher they rise in the results. This obviously tends to skew results in favor of sites with the biggest budgets. Below are both regular search engines and others that utilize the pay approach, some of which (like Overture) also feed results to regular search engines.
Overture Kanoodle