most popular search engines

At first, DuckDuckGo.com looks like Google. But there are many subtleties that make this spartan search engine different. DuckDuckGo has some slick features, like zero click information (all your answers are found on the first results page). DuckDuckgo offers disambiguation prompts (helps to clarify what question you are really asking). And the ad spam is much less than Google. Give DuckDuckGo.com a try. you might really like this clean and simple search engine.

AOL Search provides users with editorial listings that come Googles crawler based index. Indeed, the same search on Google and AOL Search will come up with very similar matches. So, why would you use AOL Search? Primarily because you are an AOL user. The internal version of AOL Search provides links to content only available within the AOL online service. In this way, you can search AOL and the entire web at the same time. The external version lacks these links. Why wouldnt you use AOL Search? If you like Google, many of Googles features such as cached pages are not offered by AOL Search.

HotBot provides easy access to the webs three major crawler based search engines: Yahoo, Google and Teoma. Unlike a meta search engine, it cannot blend the results from all of these crawlers together. Nevertheless, its a fast, easy way to get different web search opinions in one place. HotBots choose a search engine interface was introduced in December 2002. However, HotBot has a long history as a search brand before this date.HotBot debuted in May 1996, it gained a strong following among serious searchers for the quality and comprehensiveness of its crawler based results, which were provided by Inktomi, at the time. It also caught the attention of experienced web users and techies, especially for the unusual colors and interface it continues to sport today.

HotBot gained more notoriety when it switched over to using Direct Hits clickthrough results for its main listings in 1999. Direct Hit was then one of the hot search engines that had recently appeared. Unfortunately, the quality of Direct Hits results couldnt match those of another hot player that had debuted at the same time, Google. HotBots popularity began to drop.Even worse, HotBot also suffered by being owned by Lycos (now Terra Lycos). Lycos had acquired HotBot when it purchased Wired Digital in October 1998. Lycos failed to make search a priority on its flagship Lycos site as well as HotBot through much of 1999 and 2000, as it focused instead on adding portal features. The company refocused on search in late 2001, making significant improvements to the Lycos site and, as noted, reworked the HotBot site at the end of 2002.

AltaVista opened in December 1995 and for several years was the Google of its day, in terms of providing relevant results and having a loyal group of users that loved the service.Sadly, an attempt to turn AltaVista into a portal site in 1998 saw the company lose track of the importance of search. Over time, relevancy dropped, as did the freshness of AltaVistas listings and the crawlers coverage of the web.Today, AltaVista is once again focused on search. Results come from Yahoo, and tabs above the search box let you go beyond web search to find images, MP3 Audio, Video, Human category listings and News results. If you want a lighter feel than Yahoo but to still have Yahoos results, AltaVista is worth considering.AltaVista was originally owned by Digital, then taken over by Compaq, when that company purchased Digital in 1998. AltaVista was later spun off into a private company, controlled by CMGI. Overture purchasing the search engine in April 2003, then it later became part of Yahoo when Yahoo bought Overture.

Live Search (formerly Windows Live Search) is the name of Microsofts web search engine, successor to MSN Search, designed to compete with the industry leaders Google and Yahoo. The search engine offers some innovative features, such as the ability to view additional search results on the same web page (instead of needing to click through to subsequent search result pages) and the ability to adjust the amount of information displayed for each search result (i.e. just the title, a short summary, or a longer summary). It also allows the user to save searches and see them updated automatically on Live.com.The service was previously powered by LookSmart results and gained top marks for having its own team of editors that monitored the most popular searches being performed to hand pick sites believed to be the most relevant. The system worked well.

Lycos is one of the oldest search engines on the web, launched in 1994. It ceased crawling the web for its own listings in April 1999 and instead provides access to human powered results from LookSmart for popular queries and crawler based results from Yahoo for others.Fast Forward lets you see search results in one side of your screen and the actual pages listed in another. Relevant categories of human compiled information from the Open Directory appear at the bottom of the search results page.Lycos is owned by Terra Lycos, a company formed with Lycos and Terra Networks merged in October 2000. Terra Lycos also owns the HotBot search engine described above.

Owned by AOL Time Warner, Netscape Search uses Google for its main listings, just as does AOLs other major search site, AOL Search. So why use Netscape Search rather than Google? Unlike with AOL Search, theres no compelling reason to consider it. The main difference between Netscape Search and Google is that Netscape Search will list some of Netscapes own content at the top of its results. Netscape also has a completely different look and feel than Google. If you like either of these reasons, then try Netscape Search. Otherwise, youre probably better off just searching at Google.

Pipl is tenacious people search engine. Pipls claim to fame is the depths to which it can plumb the deep web to find information. When you search for a person using Pipl, youre not limited to a simple white pages search. Pipl scours databases and indexes that standard search engines normally dont touch. If its there to be found, Pipl returns all manner of things about the person youre searching for, including blog entires, photos, publications, donations on public record, profiles on social and business networking sites, and other overlooked sources. Pipl supports searching by name, username, phone number, and email.

Facebook is principally a social network, but its the first stop for many people searchers due to its widespread popularity. By Facebooks count, 150 million active users frequent the site, about a third of which are in the United States. Even if you take those numbers with a grain of salt, thats still an enormous number of people who have put themselves out there to be found. Therein lies the strength of looking for someone on Facebook: By joining the service, Facebook users have essentially put up a big sign that says, Find me

Spock is another people search engine that relies on multiple sources and aggregation to cull as much information as it can about a subject. In addition to indexing information from various news sites and social networks, Spock has a variety of notifications options available. Like 123people (below), Spock supports email notifications of changes to a person search, but you can also subscribe to an RSS feed for your search.