The Best Search Engines

One of the best search engines catching a relevant search result In this section Pandia presents the best search engines in the world. If you are looking for a all-in-one list of search engines, you should visit our Powersearch gateway.

About the best search engines

In case you did not know: A search engine is not a directory. Directories like Yahoo! or Pandia Plus are collections of links to websites reviewed and edited by human beings like you and me.

A search engine, on the other hand, uses a special program (called a spider or a crawler) to surf the Web automatically, copying all the data into a huge database (an index or list of information).

So when you are "searching" the Web using one of the best search engines, you are not searching the Web at all, but the information this engine has gathered on its computers.

Not one of the various search engines has information that covers the entire Web. Nor are all the results up to date. That is why you should use more than one of the best search engines.

Yahoo

In 2003 Yahoo! bought both the Inktomi and Overture with its two search engines, AltaVista and AlltheWeb. In March 2004 Yahoo! launched a new search engine based on these technologies.

The Yahoo! search engine now powers both the Yahoo! portal, the AlltheWeb site and various sites previously powered by AlltheWeb (Lycos included).

The Yahoo! search engine is a very powerful tool, and can probably be compared with Google as regards quality, although not as regards scope (i.e. number of pages listed).

Yahoo! has also a separate Web directory.

Yahoo!

Google

Google is one of Pandia's favorite search sites. Yes, at the moment it is probably the best search engine in the World. The main reason is that is so good at putting the best and most relevant sites at the top of the result list.

It achieves this by rating sites according to how many other sites there are that link to it. Links from popular or important sites counts more than links from smaller, unknown sites. The search engine figures that if many high quality sites link to a particular site, that site must contain some high quality information. They are so confident about this, that they have included a "I feel lucky" button that brings you directly to the first result on the hit list. It actually works most of the time.

Google is unique in that it includes files in a wide variety of formats in its regular index, not only traditional webpages, including Microsoft Office files and Acrobat PDF.

Google has also a special adaptation of the Open Directory, where it sorts the listings according to popularity. Another useful feature is the Google Groups search engine, which lets you search in the content of Usenet/Newsgroup messages (see below).

A google (or more correctly, a googol) is a 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google says they chose the name because they want to "make huge quantities of information available to everyone" and because "it sounds cool and has only six letters". Pandia believes that the real reason was that all the good .com names were taken.

Windows Live (MSN Search)

It took quite some time before Bill Gates and his friends at Microsoft understood the importance of having a search engine of their own, and at that time Yahoo! had already bought some of the best technologies available, including AltaVista and AlltheWeb.

Microsoft therefore decided to develop their own search engine technology for their MSN portal.

It is a decent search engine, although not yet of the same quality as Google. Given the resources Microsoft has available, MSN is a force to reckon with, however.

Microsoft is now making MSN Search part of its Web 2.0 strategy, i.e. part of its total set of online services called Windows Live. MSN Search was renamed Windows Live Search in September 2006.

Windows Live

Ask

Ask -- previously known as Ask Jeeves -- is the small sibling of the three big search giants Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search.

Ask.com delivers search results of a good quality, and may, if one of the others make a major strategic blunder (they always do!) climb up into the top league.

Ask Jeeves used to be known for its natural language search capability, i.e the possibility fo asking it regular questions as opposed to entering a list of key words.

To be honest, this is no longer an important point and it is better to use traditional search queries at Ask as well.

The Ask search engine integrates the Teoma search technology, the only search engine known to take the profile of the whole site into consideration when deciding on search engine rankings.

Ask.com

AlltheWeb

Scandinavia is actually one of the most Internet infested places in the world. It seems like everyone has his or her own email address (and cellular phone). And we should know, we live there...

The Fast company grew out of the Internet milieu at the university in Trondheim, Norway. It is most famous for AlltheWeb, one of the best search engines in the world. In April 2003 AlltheWeb and the Fast Web search unit were acquired by the American company Overture. Overture is known for its pay-per-click search engine technology (see below).

In 2004 Overture was acquired by Yahoo!, and in March that year Yahoo! abandoned the AlltheWeb search engine technology in favor of the new Yahoo! Search Engine. The AlltheWeb site is therefore no more than another interface for the search engine found at the Yahoo! site.

AltaVista

AltaVista was originally established as a showcase for the Digital Equipment Corporation. They wanted to demonstrate the quality and speed of their Alpha 8400 TurboLaser Computer by indexing every single word on the World Wide Web.

In 2003 the AltaVista search engine was bought by Overture, which again was bought by Yahoo!. In March 2004 the AltaVista search engine was discontinued. The AltaVista site is now powered by the Yahoo! Search Engine.

Usenet/newsgroups searching

Most of us know what a webpage is. It is when we start to venture outside the Web that things get a little bit complicated. Newsgroups -- or "the Usenet" as it is also called -- is not part of the Web as such. Well, some claim it is not even a part of the Internet! The reason for this is that your Internet service provider will have to download the individual newsgroup messages before you can read them on your own computer.

Newsgroups are discussion fora, where millions of people from all over the world discuss anything from Picasso to home gardening. The fact that anyone can contribute to these groups means that no-one can guarantee that the information given is accurate. Nevertheless, there is a lot of useful stuff here.

Although people normally use a program called a newsreader to access these groups (there are newsreaders included with Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator), there are also websites that let you read these messages in your regular browser. Deja.com (formerly known as Dejanews) was the best in the field - yes, in the end it was the only one in the field. What's even more important: Deja.com had an excellent search engine that lets you search nearly all of the existing newsgroups for information of interest.

Deja.com. is no more. The service have been bought by Google. Go to http://groups.google.com/ to search for discussion messages. Old Deja.com users may visit Goolge's guide to the relationship between Deja.com's old search syntax and Google's.