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Search Engine Secrets Top 5 - Web Design & Review

This month we decided to pay a little visit to the engines and bring ourselves up on what's happening in the world. Since we use AltaVista almost exclusively, we haven't seen the others in a while. During the visit we also made some notes that we'll pass along to you here. Note, I'll go ahead and post this page in the WebDesign & Review center so that you can link out and take a look for yourself.

Top 5

AltaVista -- http://www.altavista.digital.com/ ****
AltaVista, Digital Electronics Corp is our search engine of choice, and once you learn the intricacies of its search facility you yield some very accurate results. It runs very well with graphics off, and is fairly spam-lite. It's the most well designed search engine in the industry.

Yahoo! -- http://www.yahoo.com/ ***
Many call Yahoo the definitive index on the Net, and it was at one point. We still like Yahoo very much but it has become difficult to browse and is usually out of date. Listings can take literally weeks to come up. We've seen it take as long as 60 days. In fact one listing posted on September 3 has still not come up. Yahoo however is clean, and well organized, and we’re still faithful. Thumbs up.

Infoseek -- http://www.infoseek.com/ ***
Some experts say Infoseek ranks Web pages better than other engines, and that is a plus for the searcher. We found Infoseek to be fast and cleanly built. The interface is intuitive and free from spam. They offer other services too, including: Infoseek Ultra -- http://ultra.infoseek.com. Very nice, thumbs up.

MetaCrawler -- http://metacrawler.cs.washington.edu/ ****
MetaCrawler, at Washington.edu gets our thumbs up for being a clean, pleasant operating engine that searches nine of the other major search engines for you. This is an exhaustive search, so expect results to take sometimes as long as 14 seconds. We don't mind. The layout is appealing and restful. Try their "Mini-Engine" which presents just the search field. Put this bookmark right under Altavista and you’ll be armed for the world.

Deja News -- http://www.dejanews.com/ ****
Deja News is a wonderfully built, spam-free search engine, and probably one of the largest collections of indexed archived Usenet news in the industry. The best thing about Deja is its array of search modes from "quick" to "Power." It also has topical categories. Bookmark it for UseNet searches. Snappy graphics, easy to use interface, and well defined content wells make this one a winner! Good work folks.

Tell us what your favorite search engine is!

Then there are the others...


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