Today almost everyone uses one of the Big Three search engines: Google, Yahoo or Bing. But what about the rest? As you may know, there are others, obviously less popular, but good search engines. A friend of mine gave me the idea to search the Internet and see what else is available. Many years ago my favorite search engine was Infoseek, but somehow I switched to Google, and I don’t even remember when or how. It just happened.

Now, I wondered if Infoseek and other old engines still existed. I was sure there are more than just the Big Three. It turns out, there are many…

So here they are:

1. Ask – ask.com – Popular search engine that offers results groupings. Clean presentation of results and easy to read.
2. AOL – aol.com – America Online, very popular search engine in the US.
3. Ecosia – ecosia.org – A search engine that aims to protect the rain forests. Each search saves 2 square meters of forest.
4. Dogpile – dogpile.com – This metasearch engine displays results from the Big Three engines, Ask.com, About.com and several other popular search engines, including those from audio and video content providers.
5. Clusty – clusty.com – This deep Web engine helps you locate sites and articles that are usually tough to find.
6. Mahalo – mahalo.com – A human powered search engine, where editors review thousands of pages of content. You get fewer results but they are more relevent and better quality.
7. DuckDuckGo – duckduckgo.com – Here, all your answers are displayed on the first results page and there is less spam than on Google. This engine features help to clarify what you are really looking for.
8. Webopedia – webopedia.com – This is an encyclopedic resource dedicated to searching techno terminology and computer definitions. Great learning resource.
9. Cuil – cuil.com – Offers column format like a newspaper, and either tabbled and columned groups to help you search a topic. Doesn’t rank the results in the same way as Google.
10. Internet archive – archive.org – Offers snapshots of Web sites from the past. You can see how Web sites looked years ago.

I haven’t even heard of most of these sites. Now I’m going to see what they can do :).

By the way, Infoseek doesn’t exist anymore. It was turned into the Go.com network and replaced by the Yahoo search engine.

Interesting Internet facts. Thanks to Net For Beginners for the information.