The Design & Publishing Center . / . WebDesign & Review . / . Tools . / . Search Engines . / . #3 Others

There are lots and lots... these are others we tested...

Excite -- http://www.excite.com/
Excite is another of the big boys but has become a spam site, and is almost always painfully slow. Beware. It's searches are thorough and since it's an indexed site, it is very accurate. Excite searches Usenet news, so that's probably the cause of its slowness. The design is fairly clean, with snappy icons and graphics. Spam is held to one side so you don’t really have to look at it.

Lycos -- http://www.lycos.com/
Lycos scored a thumbs down in almost every class. First, at the same time of day -- same connect time, it was taking as much as 6-times as long to build the page. It took 44 seconds to return a search that Altavista took 7. Since they claim 91 percent of the Web, perhaps that's the reason they're so slow. The search field is up front, and only one spam message in the initial screen. Their second site http://www.lycos.com/lycosmedia.html which targets pictures and sounds had so much animation on the one page that the search query couldn't get through, and the page never fully loaded. Thumbs down for this one.

WebCrawler -- http://webcrawler.com/
Thumbs down for WebCrawler too. This one returns huge, slow search results that were always fuzzy. They give you FIVE spams to read while you're waiting.

Gang Houses

Reference.COM -- http://www.reference.com/
Most people don't know about Reference.COM, but once you try it you might just add it to your bookmarks. Reference is an intelligently designed page whose engine searches more than 16,000 Usenet newsgroups and hundreds of listservs and mailing lists. Some of the results are huge, go at low tide.

Inktomi's HotBot -- http://www.inktomi.com/
Inktomi's HotBot is a little better than the HotBot, but not much. Although it is a cleaner, 'normal' design it was perpetually sending graphics and the page never seemed to finish loading. We had already launched a search when the header graphic finally came in. Their designers also need a few lessons in visual design -- the actual LOGO appeared off screen, and we could not scroll to it because of the table set-up. Tsk,tsk, they should know better!

The Internet Sleuth -- http://www.isleuth.com/
ISleuth is another mega searcher that taps more than 2,000 other searchable databases. This layout is fairly easy on the eyes and hoists the search entry fields up high on the page. There's lots and lots of confusing links, and some spam. You are allowed to select the engines to search from a list.

If you have a favorite search engine, let us know.. We love discovering new resources on the nets.

Specialty Houses, and others...


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