Nebraska Rangelands: Internet Search Engines

Expand your repertoire.    Most people have a favorite general internet search engine. Because the many search engines focus on different subsets of the internet, function differently and present results differently, you may want to expand your searching repertoire. Here are some possibilities:   

Answers.com A search service devoted to providing direct answers, not just links, to search queries. Taking it's content from over 100 encyclopedias, dictionaries, glossaries, atlases and other sources, it generates an organized page of relevant information without requiring you to click on any further Web links. "Best of the Web" links, however, may still be included.

Ask.com Formerly called Ask Jeeves, this search engine has made major improvements over the last few years and released a new interface in February 2006. It features a toolbox on the right side that provides access to a variety of search tools including maps, images, weather, dictionary, local and desktop search. The mapping function is more sophisticated than those offered by Google and the other major search engines and uses arial photographs rather than satelite.The Encyclopedia search extends the "direct answers" Ask has provided for several years with its "smart search" feature by providing content from Wikipedia, Houghton Mifflin and Columbia encyclopedias right at the top of a result page. It also provides suggestions for broadening or narrowing your search.

GOOGLE Search The pre-eminent search engine, indexing more than 20 billion pages and with relevance ranking of search results based on linkages and authority. It provides cached "snapshots" of each site as it appeared when indexed, which can be useful you're looking for a page that no longer exists. It covers web pages, PDF and Word documents and other formats, but only indexes about the first 100K of each. Beta versions of new search services under development can be found on the Google Labs site.

Microsoft Bing Bing is the search engine from Microsoft. Bing holds the position of the second-largest search engine worldwide. Microsoft Copilot, formerly known as Bing Chat, is a chatbot. It can serve as a chat tool, write different types of content from poems to songs to stories to reports.Bing Translator offers translations in 70 different language systems.

YAHOO! Yahoo! switched to its own search technology in 2004 and its database indexes an estimated 4.2 billion pages. This is a smaller number than Google's, but Yahoo indexes to a depth of 500K while Google only indexes the first 101K and in some cases only indexes the link, not the page.See Yahoo search help. Also maintains a site geared to children, YAHOO! KIDS, which includes simplified introductions to the Internet.