Yahoo
http://www.yahoo.com

Yahoo is the web's oldest "directory," a place where human editors organize web sites into categories. However, in October 2002, Yahoo made a giant shift to crawler-based listings for its main results. These came from Google until February 2004. Now, Yahoo uses its own search technology.

In addition to excellent search results, you can use tabs above the search box on the Yahoo home page to seek images, Yellow Page listings or use Yahoo's excellent shopping search engine. Or visit the Yahoo Search home page, where even more specialized search options are offered.

The Yahoo Directory still survives. You'll notice "category" links below some of the sites lists in response to a keyword search. When offered, these will take you to a list of web sites that have been reviewed and approved by a human editor.

It's also possible to do a pure search of just the human-compiled Yahoo Directory, which is how the old or "classic" Yahoo used to work. To do this, search from the Yahoo Directory home page, as opposed to the regular Yahoo.com home page. Then you'll get both directory category links ("Related Directory Categories") and "Directory Results," which are the top web site matches drawn from all categories of the Yahoo Directory.

Sites pay a fee to be included in the Yahoo Directory's commercial listings, though they must meet editor approval before being accepted. Non-commercial content is accepted for free. Yahoo's content acquisition program also offers paid inclusion, where sites can also pay to be included in Yahoo's crawler-based results. This doesn't guarantee ranking, Yahoo promises. The CAP program also bring in content from non-profit organizations for free.

Like Google, Yahoo sells paid placement advertising links that appear on its own site and which are distributed to others. These are sold through Overture. Yahoo purchased Overture in a company Yahoo purchased in October 2003.

Overture was formerly called GoTo until late 2001. More about it can be found on the Paid Listings Search Engines page. Overture purchased AllTheWeb in March 2003 and acquired AltaVista in April 2003. Now Yahoo owns these, gained as from its purchase of Overture.

Technology AltaVista and AllTheWeb was combined with that of Inktomi, a crawler-based search engine that grew out UC Berkeley and then launched as its own company in 1996, to make the current Yahoo crawler. Yahoo purchased Inktomi in March 2003.

Inktomi
http://www.inktomi.com

Supplier to other engines. Inktomi is no longer accepting new subscribers to its Search Submit™ program. If you're interested in joining a similar program, Overture Services now offers a new program called Site Match™. Please click here to learn more and sign up.

Index Connect is now sold through Overture and its resellers. In conjunction with the launch of Site Match , the Index Connect program is now Site Match Xchange™. This change does not affect existing campaigns for Index Connect customers.

WiseNut
http://www.wisenut.com

WiseNut is a LookSmart search engine. To have your site appear in WiseNut's search results, you can submit your site to the LookSmart directory.

Ask Jeeves
http://www.askjeeves.com

Ask Jeeves initially gained fame in 1998 and 1999 as being the "natural language" search engine that let you search by asking questions and responded with what seemed to be the right answer to everything.

In reality, technology wasn't what made Ask Jeeves perform so well. Behind the scenes, the company at one point had about 100 editors who monitored search logs. They then went out onto the web and located what seemed to be the best sites to match the most popular queries.

Today, Ask Jeeves instead depends on crawler-based technology to provide results to its users. These results come from the Teoma search engine that it owns.

Ask Jeeves is doing innovative things with invisible tabs and with what it calls Smart Search. We think the future of search will be this much smarter approach to delivering up more than just web pages. It makes Ask Jeeves a well-worth a visit by anyone looking for information.

Ask Jeeves also owns now closed Direct Hit service.

AllTheWeb.com
http://www.alltheweb.com

Powered by Yahoo, you may find AllTheWeb a lighter, more customizable and pleasant "pure search" experience than you get at Yahoo itself. The focus is on web search, but news, picture, video, MP3 and FTP search are also offered.

AllTheWeb.com was previously owned by a company called FAST and used as a showcase for that company's web search technology. That's why you sometimes may sometimes hear AllTheWeb.com also referred to as FAST or FAST Search. However, the search engine was purchased by search provider Overture in late April 2003, then later become Yahoo's property when Yahoo bought Overture. It no longer has a connection with FAST.

AOL Search
http://aolsearch.aol.com (internal)
http://search.aol.com/(external)

AOL Search provides users with editorial listings that come Google's 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 wouldn't you use AOL Search? If you like Google, many of Google's features such as "cached" pages are not offered by AOL Search.

HotBot
http://www.hotbot.com

HotBot provides easy access to the web's 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, it's a fast, easy way to get different web search "opinions" in one place.

HotBot's "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 Hit's "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 Hit's results couldn't match those of another "hot" player that had debuted at the same time, Google. HotBot's 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.

Northern Light
http://www.northernlight.com

Northern Light use search, classification, and content integration technology and services to facilitate the creation of user-friendly search solutions of diverse content and enormous scale. The existing corporate clients include some of the largest, best known names in the high tech field, and these clients typically have tens of thousands of employees using our solutions on a daily basis.

Northern Light Group has 45 full and part time employees and is profitable and self-sufficient from a funding viewpoint. Every Northern Light employee shares one common characteristic, and that is a compulsive drive to provide the very best customer support possible.

Teoma
http://www.teoma.com

Teoma is a crawler-based search engine owned by Ask Jeeves. It has a smaller index of the web than its rival crawler-competitors Google and Yahoo. However, being large doesn't make much of a difference when it comes to popular queries, and Teoma's won praise for its relevancy since it appeared in 2000. Some people also like its "Refine" feature, which offers suggested topics to explore after you do a search. The "Resources" section of results is also unique, pointing users to page that specifically serve as link resources about various topics. Teoma was purchased by Ask Jeeves in September 2001 and also provides some results to that web site.

AltaVista
http://www.altavista.com

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 AltaVista's listings and the crawler's 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 Yahoo's 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.

Gigablast
http://www.gigablast.com

With one of the largest and freshest indexes in the world, Gigablast Inc. has recently joined the elite ranks of major search engine companies.

Founded in 2000, Gigablast was created to index up to 200 Billion pages with the least amount of hardware possible. Gigablast provides large-scale, high-performance, real-time information retrieval technology for partner sites. The company offers a variety of features including topic generation and the ability to index multiple document formats. This search delivery mechanism gives a partner "turn key" search capability and the capacity to instantly offer search at maximum scalability with minimum cost. In addition, the Gigablast website (www.gigablast.com) provides unique "Gigabits" of information, enabling visitors to easily refine their search based upon related topics from search results. Clients range from NASDAQ 100 listed corporations to boutique companies.

Compared to Google, Yahoo or even Teoma, Gigablast has a tiny index of the web. However, the service is constantly gaining new and interesting features. Give it a whirl, if you want to try something experimental yet dependable. Read more about Gigablast in this recent interview from our SearchDay newsletter.

LookSmart
http://www.looksmart.com

LookSmart is primarily a human-compiled directory of web sites. It gathers its listings in two ways. Commercial sites pay to be listed in its commercial categories, making the service very much like an electronic "Yellow Pages." However, volunteer editors at the LookSmart-owned Zeal directory also catalog sites into non-commercial categories for free. Though Zeal is a separate web site, its listings are integrated into LookSmart's results.

LookSmart launched independently in October 1996, was backed by Reader's Digest for about a year, and then company executives bought back control of the service.

LookSmart also bought the WiseNut crawler-based search engine in April 2002. WiseNut's are offered through the LookSmart via its Web tab above the search box. Unlike its competitors, the WiseNut crawler has often been out of date, sometimes for months at a time.

Finally, the real gem at LookSmart can be found via its Articles tab. That provides access to content from thousands of periodicals.

Lycos
http://www.lycos.com

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.

MSN Search
http://search.msn.com

Formerly one of Search Engine Watch's top choices, MSN Search is definitely one to watch. 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.

Today, MSN Search is in transition. It provides access to Yahoo listings but not as much functionality in terms of other types of searches that you'll find at Yahoo itself. However, MSN is developing its own crawler-based technology and planning other changes that should revitalize the service in later 2004.

Netscape Search
http://search.netscape.com

Owned by AOL Time Warner, Netscape Search uses Google for its main listings, just as does AOL's other major search site, AOL Search. So why use Netscape Search rather than Google? Unlike with AOL Search, there's no compelling reason to consider it. The main difference between Netscape Search and Google is that Netscape Search will list some of Netscape's 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, you're probably better off just searching at Google.

Open Directory
http://dmoz.org/

The Open Directory uses volunteer editors to catalog the web. Formerly known as NewHoo, it was launched in June 1998. It was acquired by AOL Time Warner-owned Netscape in November 1998, and the company pledged that anyone would be able to use information from the directory through an open license arrangement.

While you can search at the Open Directory site itself, this is not recommended. The site has no "backup" results that kick in should there not be a match in the human-compiled database. In addition, the ranking of sites during keyword searching is poor, while alphabetical ordering is used when you choose to "browse" categories by topic.

Instead, to scan the valuable information compiled by the Open Directory, consider using the version offered by Google, the Google Directory. Here, keyword searching uses Google's refined relevancy algorithms and makes use of link analysis to better propel good pages from the human database to the top. In addition, when viewing sites by category, they will be listed in PageRank order, which means the most popular sites based on analyzing links from across the web will be listed first.

kelly Search
http://www.kellysearch.com

Kelly's was established in the United Kingdom over two hundred years ago in 1799 and has been published ever since. Kelly's has become synonymous with high quality industrial Product and Service Information. The Kelly's product and service range builds on this success offering a powerful advertising medium for industrial companies across the globe.

Kelly's has changed and adapted over the years to meet the needs of its users. We are dedicated to providing a high quality service to both our users and our advertisers and it is because of this dedication and hard work that Kelly's has grown in strength over such a long period of time. We now offer a global database of companies to our users and even more opportunities to companies around the world wanting to promote their services.