Golden oldies

Ask Jeeves (www.ask.com) is one of the biggest engines outside the top table, and claims to be most peoples second favourite engine. The original concept of using natural language (where can I find bike shops in Glasgow?) still holds true, although it also caters for keyword searching. The hard work is done by the Teoma engine (www.teoma.com), which Jeeves acquired in 2000. Both give clean results, including image and related search options, and Jeeves also offers MyJeeves, which remembers your searches and lets you save important ones.Other long standing search names are still going, though most have been bought out by larger rivals or exist in radically different forms. Pioneer AltaVista (www.altavista.com) was bought out by a series of small firms until it was hoovered up by Yahoo, and it now uses Yahoo results, though it still boasts one of the webs best translators, BabelFish ( babelfish.altavista.com). Other engines including Inktomi have also been consumed by the Yahoo brand.

One of the webs earliest search successes, Lycos (www.lycos.com), is still around, though it, too, has changed hands many times. It now works in tandem with Hotbot (www.hotbot.com), a metasearch site that pulls results from across several engines to produce aggregated and theoretically better results.Dogpile (www.dogpile.com) is probably the best known metasearch engine, and draws results from Jeeves, Google, Yahoo and others. It pulls answers from these and removes duplicates, but sometimes misses some of the more idiosyncratic results. It also searches across images, audio, video and news. If you find the results arent quite your cup of tea, you could turn to MetaCrawler (www.metacrawler.com), which is also owned by Dogpiles parent company, Infospace. Metacrawler was launched in 1994, so it has a long track record, and it produces filtered results from a familiar range of sources.