Internet Gurus Search Page

Updated September 13, 2011.

You can use all of your favorite Web search pages from this page! Each box performs a search of the World Wide Web using a search page. Type something in the box and press Enter to perform a search. Or click the name of the Web search page (for example, "Google") to go to the main page for that site.

The results of each search are opened in a new browser window. If you want to start over with another search, switch back to this window and start again!

Our favorites

When we're looking for something on the net, these three sites usually find it for us.

Google

Google uses a proprietary technique to rank pages by relevance, so the first pages you find are usually the ones that bear most directly on the topic you were searching for. Also has indexes of images, usenet discussions, and current news stories from online sources around the world.
Try the built in forward and reverse phone book (enter a name and two-letter state abbreviation or a phone number), and maps (enter an address, city, state.)
Microsoft Bing

Bing is Microsoft's Google Killer. It's nowhere near as comprehensive as Google, but Microsoft is working really hard on it so it's worth a try.
DuckDuckGo

This quirky search engine promises not to collect or share personal information. Rather than trying to build a search from scratch, it uses (with permission) a wide range of information sources, from Bing to the Muppet Wiki.
DuckDuckGo is a labor of love, mostly written by one guy in Pennsylvania.

Also worth searching

The web has hundreds of search engines. Here are some more we've used.

Ask Jeeves

Ask Jeeves is partly a web index and partly a manually maintained directory of questions and answers. If your topic is one they address (and they address a heck of a lot of them), its information is of extremely high quality. Teoma

The search engine part of Ask Jeeves, relevance rank based on how popular the site was with previous search users. Also returns paid listings. Formerly known as Direct Hit.

Lycos

Lycos was the first automated web index, now part of Terra Lycos, a web portal controlled by Telefonica, the Spanish phone company. In many ways they've long since been surpassed by Google and Yahoo, although the little thumbnails of the web sites they find are cute. Ranks by how often sites clicked by people making similar searches before, not unlike Teoma.
Aardvark
http://www.vark.com
This quirky offering does social search. You sign up, usually with your Google or Facebook account, ask a question, then it tries to find one of your friends or friends of friends and IM's you the answer.
The results are widely variable depending on who your friends are, but it's kind of fun. It's owned by Google, but for now at least, it's run separately.

What happened to the other search engines you used to list?

The Internet changes every day, and with the dot.com implosion, many sites have gone away.
Yahoo! is still around, but their search is really Google.
AllTheWeb was absorbed by Overture Services which was bought by Yahoo, so although it doesn't look like Yahoo, it has the same data as Yahoo.
AltaVista has also been absorbed by Yahoo. The results are from Yahoo, but some people like the presentation better.
Northern Light got rid of their search engine and now just has their "Special Collection" service, mostly of business research.
Magellan merged into Excite.
Excite's parent company went bankrupt and the site was absorbed by InfoSpace (Try clicking on their name and see what they turned into.) They now give preferred placement to sites that pay to be listed, and have an impressive blizzard of pop-up ads.
Hotbot was sold to Lycos and no longer has any distinctive content.
Infoseek merged into Disney's go.com and disappeared into the inferior overture.com which shows sites in order of how much they paid to be listed.
Savvy Search disappeared, probably because the students running it lost interest or graduated.

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Ask Jeeves Ask Jeeves is partly a web index and partly a manually maintained directory of questions and answers. If your topic is one they address (and they address a heck of a lot of them), its information is of extremely high quality.	Teoma The search engine part of Ask Jeeves, relevance rank based on how popular the site was with previous search users. Also returns paid listings. Formerly known as Direct Hit.
Lycos Lycos was the first automated web index, now part of Terra Lycos, a web portal controlled by Telefonica, the Spanish phone company. In many ways they've long since been surpassed by Google and Yahoo, although the little thumbnails of the web sites they find are cute. Ranks by how often sites clicked by people making similar searches before, not unlike Teoma.	Aardvark http://www.vark.com This quirky offering does social search. You sign up, usually with your Google or Facebook account, ask a question, then it tries to find one of your friends or friends of friends and IM's you the answer. The results are widely variable depending on who your friends are, but it's kind of fun. It's owned by Google, but for now at least, it's run separately.

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