Recommended Search Engines

[ skip to search engine recommendations ] [ other US Netizen recommendations ]

Search engines come in three main flavors:  Primary, Secondary, and Meta. 

Primary search engines have their own crawler and index and generate their own results in response to your query.  Primary search engines include Google, MSN, and Yahoo. These are the creators of the results, so why not go directly to the source?

Secondary search engines take your query and run it through a primary search engine and add some advertisements.  Secondary search engines are nearly useless and we recommend that you skip these because they really don't offer any thing that the primaries don't have.  Secondary search engines include: AOL Search, Netscape, Excite, Lycos, AltaVista, Alltheweb, Hotbot, and many more.  Save yourself from a few ads and skip the secondaries.

Metasearch engines are like secondary search engines in that they obtain their results from the primaries.  What is different is that they tend to use all the primaries giving you a different sort on the same results.  Metasearch engines include Dogpile, Vivisimo, Kartoo, Mamma and others.  These may work well for you, but they really are not unique.

Comparison of Primary Search Engines

Google has been at the top of the heap for search engines for some time.  You get Google results when you use these search engines:  Aol search, Excite, and Netscape.  You can try a search in Google below:

 

Yahoo bought a search company called Inktomi that generates the primary search results for Yahoo.  Inktomi also supplies results to AltaVista, AlltheWeb, Lycos, Hotbot, and many smaller search engines.  Yahoo also was supplying MSN with results until 2006.  You can try a search in Yahoo below:

    

 

Microsoft has created an entirely new search engine for MSN and renamed it Live.  Although the main MSN page used Inktomi results for a long time, this has changed.  The new Live search engine is very fast at returning results.  Live is the only place you can use this new engine.  Try it here:

These are a few also-rans in the primary search market. The do create their own results and deserve some respect for being innovative rather than just rebranding someone else's work. You may have some luck with these:

Gigablast Teoma

Which Search Engine is Better?

We design and promote websites and examine the search engine results much more thoroughly than the normal Internet user.  A search engine should produce relevant results.  The site or answer you are looking for should appear on the first page.  You want content, not links to content.  What we see sometimes is search engine spam.  Spam doesn't have to be in e-mail. Search engine spam is results that are not content, but can be advertisements, results of other searches, directory listings, pages that redirect you to something else, etc.

We currently recommend Google as your primary search engine.  For the last several months, the results from Google have been improving and the relevance of it's results is much better than it was a earlier this year.  Google still has a very real problem with adding new sites to it's index.  You usually only get results from sites that are more than one year old. 

Yahoo (Inktomi) is currently producing more relevant results than MSN.  We recommend Google as your primary search engine with Yahoo as your backup.  Tip:  You don't need to use the portal pages that are loaded with news snippets.  Each of these have a clean search-only page listed below.

US Netizen Honorable Mention:  Yahoo Search
Try MSN:  MSN Search

Google without the Ads: Google Search

Google without ads or descriptions: Google Search

If you are searching for images, Google is currently recommended.

Sign Up On-Line or by Telephone

FREE SETUP

Instant Account Activation