What do Lycos, Infoseek, Magellan, Excite, AltaVista, Inktomi, Northern Light and Dogpile all have in common?
These once popular search engines have "eaten Google’s search dust,” so to speak.
Around 2000, Google’s search engine rose to prominence, achieving better search results with PageRank, an innovation that measures website pages' importance based upon how many other pages link to it.
As of December 2014, Google had two-thirds of all web search engine traffic with Baidu (Chinese) at 11 percent, Bing at 10 percent and Yahoo at 9 percent.
Still, there are other cool search engines you should try.
Phil Bradley, an information specialist and Internet consultant, put together a list of 170-plus search engines. He searched everything from abbreviations and acronyms to sound effects and social media. You can find the list at www.philb.com/webse.htm.
If you are not sure what type of search engine you’re looking for, it is helpful to see examples of these major types of search engines:
•keyword search
•index or directory-based search
•multi or meta search
•visual results search
•category search
Find that list at www.philb.com/whichengine.htm.
So, from “About” to “Zeekly” (for private searching, with nothing kept or stored, including IP addresses), happy searching!
Sandra Dreaden is the Crestview Public Library's reference librarian.
This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: CHECK IT OUT: More than Google: 170+ search engines