Finding Things on the Web

Posted by techgirl

Posted: March 22, 2009 - 4:26 am

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kartoo resultsBelieve it or not, there are many search engines out there besides Google and new ones popping up all the time. If something exists on the Web, chances are there is a tool out there that can find it. Here are a few search engines you may not have tried that can hone in on the things you are trying to locate.

Dogpile is a meta-search meaning that it searches all the best search engines to cast a wider net when you are looking for something. Their engine taps into Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, Windows Live among others. Think of it as your One Stop Search Engine.

AltaVista has been around for eons. I still use it for one particular kind of search: to find out what web sites are linked to a particular URL or web site address. To do this, you enter the word "link" followed by a colon and the URL like this:

link:http://www.mediaegg.com

Alexa let's you search the web for company information and will give you a ranking of web sites and pages. You can also do a comparison between companies to see which one has a more popular site.

Kartoo does something different with search results by presenting what it locates in an entirely graphical format. You end up with a kind of "cloud" of web pages that include keywords related to your search term.

Cuil claims to search three times as many web sites as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft. Cuil ranks pages based on their content and relevance to the keywords you used in your search. Once it finds relevant pages, Cuil then digs deeper to access more content on the related site including the "concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency."

If you want to search for relevant articles, Ensembli is a smart search engine that learns over time what interests you. First, you have to enter your topics of interest. Ensembli brings together blog posts and articles related to that topic from the last 30 days. As you read - or ignore - the articles, Ensembli hones in on what seems more important to you based on your actions.

As you can see, Google isn't the only game in town. Depending on what you need to find, there's probably a search engine tailor-made for you.

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