Major Search Engines and Directories
Major search engines
Search engine is a computer program. It is designed to aid the users in searching documents, pages, files or folders, images, video, audio that is stored on the Internet. It is structured in such a way that it is able to locate documents, pages, files or folders that satisfy the requirements or criteria set by the user. These requirement or criteria can be in the form of a word, phrase or sentence. The major search engines are:
Google: One of the major search engines, Google is the product of a project of Stanford University graduates Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It is a dominant leader in the search engine market. The domination of Google in the search market has seen the coining of the word ' to google' which basically means to search on the net. The URL is www.google.com
Yahoo: Yahoo was launched in 1994. Initially it was a directory. Later in the year 2002 it made its transition into a search engine. www.yahoo.com
Ask: It was initially known as askjeeves.com. P.G. Wodehouse inspired the name from the famous valet Jeeves made immortal. It later renamed itself as ask.com and also removed the image of the famous butler from its homepage. www.ask.com
Lycos: Another old name in the world of search engines, it is owned by terra Lycos. It was developed by Dr. Michael L. Mauldin and a team of researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University Center in 1994. www.lycos.com
MSN Search: This search engine belongs to the famous Microsoft family. http://search.msn.com
AOL: AOL stands for America Online. It was independent before Time Warner acquired it. The URL is www.aol.com
The other search engines that are available are:
| Search Engine | Search Engine Link |
| AltaVista | http://www.altavista.com |
| Webcrawler | http://www.webcrawler.com |
| Alltheweb | http://www.alltheweb.com |
| Exact seek | http://exactseek.com |
| Go click | https://www.goclick.com |
| Hotbot | http://www.hotbot.com |
| Excite | http://www.excite.com |
| Gigablast | http://www.gigablast.com |
Major search Directories
Directories are a search tool resource. It is like a search engine i.e. it helps the user in finding out the information on the Internet as per his requirements. But the fundamental of operation is different for a search engine and a search directory. It has human editors who go through the sites submitted to them, find out the topic on which the site is all about and list it into a proper category.
Open directory project: This is an open directory, which is hosted and administered by Netscape Communication Corporation. It is developed and managed by human editors who volunteer to edit those sites, which basically represent their area of interest. The URL of the site has ' DMOZ'. It stands for Directory Mozilla. Mozilla refers to the Mozilla browser, which is a project by the Netscape group. http://dmoz.org
Yahoo: Yahoo is one of the oldest directory in the world. It later made a transition in to a search engine. If one visits the main yahoo portal, one can see the directory option in the search category. http://dir.yahoo.com
Looksmart: looksmart is a human compiled directory. The editors are paid to go through and review the sites. http://search.looksmart.com
About: Scott Kurnit founded about.com in 1996. It was originally named as The Mining Company. It was re christened as about.com in 1999. It was acquired by The New York Times Company in 2005. http://www.about.com
