TIGERX.COM Library: Top Search Engines

The TIGERX Public Internet Library

Search Engines

A search engine is a website tool that searches the internet for topics related to what you are looking for. The easiest way to give an example of this is to imagine yourself in a library. Instead of searching the aisles or card catalogs for items on topics you are looking for, imagine typing in a simple phrase like "top search engines" or "cooking chicken". A search engine would go find all those books (or websites in this case) that contains the information on that subject. But if you are too vague you can wind up with thousands and tens of thousands of unrelated material. If you are looking for information on model airplanes as a hobby, type "building model airplanes". If you were to type just "models" you would wind up with everything from supermodels to pornography to models of all types, houses, cars, etc. etc. etc.
Now, the problem with search engines is that there are hundreds of millions of pages on the world wide web, and they cannot get their electronic spiders to sweep them all. These "spiders" sweep a webpage for all the text in the page and categorizes it. The problem is, that poronographic sites include terms like "business, money, and celebrity names" in their website so that the search engines pick that up as well. I personally was shocked and angry to find that the results for my search on "dancing" yielded over a hundred sites with nothing to do with dancing (mambo, ballet, swing), but pornographic sites, and the first one having four letter words I would not use even when angry. I shot off a letter to this particular search engine company and they apologized (in fact I got 4 responses from different departments/people) apologizing and explaining that porn spammer are so agressive it is hard to filter all of this material out, but they are trying desparately and using all modern software and technology to prevent this.
For this reason, we at TIGERX.COM strongly advocate for all adult/pornographic website begin with the letters xxx.adultstuff.com instead of www.porno.com -- this way it can be filtered out from young children doing a report for grammer school on dancing and finding that sort of material that is not related, and uncalled for. Given the fact that there are search engines for adults only, there is no reason for them to spam on "public" search engines. If people want to find porn, let them do a search for "xxx" or "porn", it is easiest enough to find, keep X-Rated sites off the G & PG search engine sites and the hands of our children.
That protest aside, here are what we consider to be the Top 10 Search engines:
1) TIGERX.COM www.tigerx.com -- Are we biased... you bet! We have gone through legnthy measures to find material that best suits what you are looking for and you will find NO links to x-rated on our site. We have also picked the most relevant material regarding those topics in over 200 categories. Save the trouble of sifting through websites when a search engine has returned thousands of results that are irrelelvant to what you are looking for. Additionally, all of those topics are listed right on our homepage. If you do not see it there, do a search from the homepage, and if your search does not give you results on what you are looking for, let use know we will create a special category and section for it. You can also find the top 500 search engines on our site at tigerx.com/sites/search.htm.
2) Northern Light www.northernlight.com - - This search engine is so unique, that there is a patent pending for it. It categorizes the results of your search into folders such as personal pages, commercial pages, educational pages, etc., etc. This is useful in the effect that if you are doing a search for "fishing" you probably do not want the commercial sites, but the sporting or personal pages, so you can refer to those folders, bypassing the results on commerical fishing.
3) Alta Vista altavista.digital.com - - This is the daddy of all search engines by Digital Corporation. They power many of the other search engines such as Yahoo and it gets an estimated 14 million hits per day.
4) Hot Bot www.hotbot.com - - This site is organized very well and also has directories on popular subjects and allows you different types of searches. You may have seen the many commercials that parody other search engines that come to always pulling up old, outdated pages and websites. Hot Bot claims that their search engine will not pull them up, but they did when we searched on some of our favorite topics.
5) Yahoo www.yahoo.com - - Yahoo was a hobby/experiment started by an Asian college student and then flourished into one of the most popular search engines around. They organize their information like Hot Bot (or vice verse) and while it is tremendously popular, we still prefer some of the others, but we cannnot deny it is still a good search engine.
6) Excite www.excite.com - - A simple, but useful website that organizes information well into categories like Hot Bot and Yahoo. It has a simple interface and allows you to personalize the page for the information you want it to display at startup.
7) Search search.cnet.com - - We are big fans of of C|Net.com -- all of their sites are very informational, easy to use, and cater to both those who are novice and experts when it comes to the internet and computers. This site is unique in the fact that you can search exclusively for softare, tech news, shareware, games and more.
8) Dogpile www.dogpile.com - - This is a user-friendly, multi-search engine search engine searcher, if that does not make sense, what it means, is that is simultaneously searches the top 15 search engines, usenet groups, and ftp and returns the results to you. This was also picked as the TIGERX.COM Website Of the Week Award.
9) Webcrawler www.webcrawler.com - - This is another multi-search engine searchers that offers a number of great resources.
10) Search Engine Watch www.searchenginewatch.com - - This is a Mecklermedia Corporation which tells you all about other search engines, which are new and which are best. Worthwhile visiting.
For A List of More Search Engines: www.tigerx.com/sites/search.htm

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