By Danny Sullivan , October 22, 2001
About.com
http://www.about.com/
About.com, formerly the Mining Company, features hundreds of
"guides" offering original content in various areas. While
About.com isn't really a search service, the guides do have extensive
links to other sites -- not to mention top-notch content of their own.
Britannica.com
http://www.britannica.com/
Links to top web sites and content from the Encyclopedia Britannica,
in one place.
Excite
http://www.excite.com
Excite results are dominated by paid listings from Overture, with non-paid
results from Inktomi. Before Dec. 2001, Excite was a crawler-based
search engine that gathered its own results. Excite was
originally launched in late 1995. It grew quickly in prominence and consumed two of
its competitors, Magellan in July 1996, and WebCrawler in November 1996.
Magellan was discontinued in April 2001. WebCrawler continues to operate
as a separate service, but it provides the same results at the Excite.com site itself.
In Nov. 2001, Excite was acquired by InfoSpace, which also operates meta
search engines Dogpile and MetaCrawler.
iWon
http://www.iwon.com
iWon's results come from both Overture & Inktomi. iWon gives away daily, weekly and
monthly prizes in a marketing model unique among the major services. It
launched in Fall 1999.
WebWombat
http://www.webwombat.com.au/
Search engine which lists pages from sites within the .au (Australia)
and .nz (New Zealand) domains. It also provides global coverage.
WebCrawler
http://www.webcrawler.com/
WebCrawler is essentially a copy of the Excite service, above. WebCrawler was
originally a completely independent service, opened to the public on
April 20, 1994. It was started as a research project at the University
of Washington. America Online purchased it in March 1995 and was the
online service's preferred search engine until Nov. 1996. That was when
Excite, a WebCrawler competitor, acquired the service.
PepeSearch
http://www.pepesearch.com/
Uses search results from FAST (see the Major Search
Engines page).
Aeiwi
http://www.aeiwi.com/
Not your normal search engine, Aeiwi has you click on words to build
your search. Reading the instructions is a must, but they aren't long.
Links2Go
http://www.links2go.com/
A directory-style search engine that uses artificial intelligence
techniques to cluster related topics and URLs together.
SearchKing
http://www.searchking.com
A searchable directory of web sites that offers instant indexing of
submitted web sites.
Qango.com
http://www.qango.com/
Directory of web sites.