Life beyond Yahoo!

Searchengine Colossus

For a comprehinsive directory of search engines there is nothing to beat Search Engine Colossus which lists over a 1000 engines from over 100 countries around the world. There are 26 pertaining to India alone, though many of these are based abroad. The folk behind this Canadian site have not just done a plain listing but have used colour codes to denote the efficiency of each engine. Thus three types of engines have been differentiated: search engines which gather information via spider-robots (white typeface), searchable directories which gather and list information via human effort (neon typeface), and the unusual or unique search engines (brown typeface). Besides the countrywise listing, you can also search for city-specific engines or go to specialised search engines which are listed by topic. So go ahead. Search for the search engine of your choice.

Ask Jeeves

P.G. Wodehouse's enduring butler Jeeves has been one hell of a help for me on the Web. The creators of Ask Jeeves have chosen the good old butler as the purveyor of answers to all your queries. Just type in a query word in the space provided and click 'Ask!' When researching an article on Kevin Spacey recently, I just entered the actor’s name and I got a series of questions thrown at me asking for the actor’s biodata, his cinematography, his fan clubs and pictures of the star. For kids, there is a special section which opens the Web gates to subjects of interest to the little ones. The site is linked to other search engines so you get guided even into their data banks.

Scour.net

Regular search engines could be quite a pain if the site you`re looking for is one with only whistles and bells, to wit, one with multimedia-rich content. So enter Scour.Net which is a guide exclusively for multimedia on the Internet. So if you`re looking for sites that use audio, video, images and animation, then Scour.Net is your one-stop shop. Here you can also avail of a free 'helper’ application, the Scour Media Agent, that works in conjunction with the Scour.Net web site to let you download multimedia including MP3files faster and more reliably. Here you’ll also find links for downloading multimedia tools like audio and video players, encoders and rippers (for converting music from CDs to MP3 format). The site also lists the top searches for MP3, video, images and radio.

Dogpile

Dogpile is a top meta search engine, that is, one which does not use just its own Web listings, but searches several other engines simultaneously, returning the best results from each. You enter your search word or string and then, doggie style, press 'fetch.' Dogpile searches over 25 major search sites, including Usenet newsgroups, ftp sites for file downloads, business news, stock quotes, jobs and careers, weather, auctions, maps etc. Three sites are thrown up at a time starting with ones that provide results closest to your search. Besides the list of sites, it also offers you useful categories for narrowing down your search. Thus, when we looked for Elton John the specific search box offered us concerts, MP3 downloads, discography, and videos which feature the singer. Then if you don`t want to call up the Dog Pile home page every time you want to do a search, bring up the remote, named Arfie which only contains the search-strip. Yes, the dog can be man`s best friend in the virtual world too!

Google

The fastest and most efficient search engine we’ve encountered is Google.com. The site uses a technology which ranks search results not by how frequently or prominently the search term appears on a particular page, but by how often other pages on the Web link to the page with reference to that term. Since Google only returns Web pages that contain all the words in your query, all you need to do is add more query words to the terms you have already entered. This new query will return a specific subset of the pages returned by your original "too-broad" query. Then there is the 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button, which, when clicked, takes you directly to a Website which is closest to what you’ve asked for -- it could well be just what you’re seeking. A site may have been attached to Google at a particular time, and may now be no longer functional. So, if after you click a site you get that awful message: 'Site not found' by clicking on the ‘cached link’ in the search result you can still access the site. Google is a search engine pure and simple with absolutely no other frills. The search results therefore spill out faster than any of the all-in-one types like Yahoo!

Manuel Fernandes

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