Search Engines

Submitted by admin on Sat, 02/05/2011 - 00:15

I'm always interested in new search engines, old ones, and how well they find shtuff. There have been many ones over the last decade or so, and some are better than others at different times. Some find things that others don't and rank the content on the web differently.

Search engines are extremely important and having more than one is essential in having a free (freedom of speech) internet. In fact, one might think that they are critical, and be more or less correct.

Many debates are arising because of search engines and what they display let alone find. Copyright, secrets, and privacy are constantly being challenged, among other long held concepts. Perhaps, these are the engines of change and long held beliefs are necessarily requiring updates. Some old ideas may need to be or should be abandoned with other ideas replacing or usurping their positions.

There is a new search of which I've become aware. YaCy. This is an interesting experiment and we should all keep an eye on it. This is a distributed search engine where each user is part of the search engine, i.e. peers. If this P2P search grows and becomes common, it could be a boon to freedom of information and reduce the potential for censorship. The downside is that you should have an application running locally (or sort of personally somewhere) which means that it is primarily for techies now. The results are quite good. Give it a try. You don't have to install anything to try it, but it is best (as in you participate, instead of leech) if you do.

Anyway, here is a list of those I have found to actually be useful. There are other "searches" out there that are really not anything more than a hacked together pile of links. Though those can be handy, they are pretty limited.

Those listed here are:

encrypted.google.com
www.duckduckgo.com
www.alltheweb.com
www.snap.com
www.search.yahoo.com
www.ask.com
www.altavista.com
www.excite.com
www.search.lycos.com
www.mamma.com
www.clusty.com
www.metacrawler.com
www.bing.com
www.visoo.com
www.wolframalpha.com
search.yacy.net