Web search engines are driven by software code that searches for information on the World Wide Web, returning a list of web sites, web pages or web documents where search terms, keywords or key phrases were found. Search engines send "spiders" to gather information from as many documents as possible, while an indexer reads these documents and creates an index based on words contained in each document, using proprietary algorithms.
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Metasearch EnginesNiche Search Engines |
 
 
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A subsidiary of Amazon.com, Alexa provides search functions through its browser toolbar, once utilizing its own search engine, but now providing results through Google, with its primary business model being its site traffic evaluation tools. Alexa also maintains the Internet Archive.
http://www.alexa.com/
Formerly known as Live Search, Windows Live Search and MSN Search, Bing is a web search engine operated by Microsoft, which returns search results from the World Wide Web, images, videos, maps and news. Recent searches may be viewed or cleared by the user.
http://www.bing.com/
Users are prompted to search on words or phrases, and the results are presented from Bing and from Google, without the user being told which is which. The user is then asked to choose the results most favored, without being told which is which. After a series of searches, the user is told which of the two search engines were preferred, based on the user's choices.
http://www.bingiton.com/
Co-founded by Rich Skrenta, Blekko is a company that provides a web search engine offering results gathered from content providers that have been screened by its editors to exclude content farms and other sites considered unreliable.
http://blekko.com/
DuckDuckGo is an Internet search engine that uses information from crowdsourced websites, such as Wikipedia, to augment its traditional search results. Another feature of the search engine is that it protects user privacy and, because it does not profile users, all users are shown the same search results for a given search word or phrase.
https://duckduckgo.com/
Launched in 2000, Entireweb is an international search engine, which is used as a source for data from Ixquick, Exactseek, and other metasearch engines, as well as being able to be accessed directly from its site, offering web search, image search, and social media sites.
http://www.entireweb.com/
Gigablast is an independent search engine that is used as the back end search engine for a variety of web sites, supporting specialized searches and Boolean operators, as well as a proprietary related concepts feature. Advanced searches may be conducted using a number of variables.
http://www.gigablast.com/
Google web search accesses publicly accessible documents offered by web servers in HTML, PDF, and other formats, including images, maps, music, books, and other media, offering several special features beyond its original word-search capabilities. Access to many of Google’s other webmaster tools and other resources is accessible through the site, as well.
http://www.google.com/
Hakia is an Internet search engine utilizing its own QDEXing technology, which uses an algorithm that is a mix from ontological semantics, fuzzy logic, computational logistics, and mathematics. An overview of the company and its semantic search features are provided.
http://www.hakia.com/
Search Engine Guide is an educational website that provides search engine information and translates search marketing for the use of small business owners. The website provides search engine marketing articles that covers topics from analytics to viral marketing and a search engine marketing guide that contains step-by-step procedure. The website also contains details on small business conferences, features search engine news and provides a search engine directory and a search marketing eBook.
http://www.searchengineguide.com
Featuring its own proprietary web search, augmented by Google results, as well as an Internet directory, mail, news, and many other features, the Yahoo! web search offers a search of the World Wide Web, images, video, news, and local searches.
http://www.yahoo.com/