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So you are going to search for something on the Web or tell a student or someone else to. What do you say? "I will Google it," or "Google it." Google has become the synonym for web search. It is now an integral part of our language just as Kleenex, Clorox and Spam are.
Through the years there have been many other search engines just as popular as Google is now (remember Magellan, Infoseek, AltaVista and even Yahoo), but none lent its name to the whole search process.
There are a lot more search engines out there. "Yes," you say, "there are." "Well," I say, "stop reading right now and list some."
How many did you come up with? 5? 10? Even more? I am sure you thought of Yahoo, AOL, Ask, and MSN. (AOL uses Google software and MSN no longer exists. It is now Live Search]) Some of the old folks may have mentioned the ones I listed above along with examples such as AlltheWeb, Ixquick, and Dogpile.
There are hundreds of unique search engines in the United States and thousands of unique search engines around the world. If we get into search engines designed just to search particular web sites, the number is in the hundreds of thousands. Let's take a look at some of the more interesting ones - well, at least some we can look at in the allotted space. Check the references below for many really fun ones. I searched for "descy" most of the time and each engine found pages the others didn't! I even found pages and information I never knew existed . . . and I search a great deal. So try the same search with each example.
Clustering Search Engines
Most search engines display results in a long one-dimensional list. We all know that the web is really an interconnected three-dimensional being. Clustering Search Engines try to bridge this gap. They present their search results...