A search engine is a searchable database of web sites which have been collected by a computer program (usually called a crawler, robot, or spider). Although there may appear to be a choice of hundreds of search engines on the web, in reality most of them rely on the same major search engines. 

The following are the most popular search engines

Google is the most popular choice for web searchers. It offers the largest collection of web pages of any crawler-based search engine. Google makes use of link analysis as a way to rank pages. Google provides web page search results to a variety of partners, including Yahoo and The Open Directory Project

Alltheweb is the public search engine and technology for FAST. It is a search with a simple interface and huge database behind it, currently holding over 2 billion pages. You can also find news, picture, video, MP3 and FTP in its search.

Using the same database as Ask Jeeves, it ranks sites partly by subject-specific popularity. Subject-Specific Popularity ranks a site based on the number of same-subject pages that reference it, not just general popularity, to determine a site's level of authority. It clusters results into subject groups, and lists related link collections by experts and enthusiasts where appropriate.

Microsoft's MSN Search service is a LookSmart-powered directory of web sites, with secondary results that come from Inktomi. Direct Hit data is also made available

The main listings for categories and web sites come from the Open Directory and Inktomi also provides crawler-based results, as backup to the directory information.

Originally, there was an Inktomi search engine. The creators then formed their own company with the same name and created a new Inktomi index, which was first used to power HotBot. Now the Inktomi index also powers several other services. All of them tap into the same index, though results may be slightly different. This is because Inktomi provides ways for its partners to use a common index yet distinguish themselves.

AltaVista is one of the oldest crawler-based search engines on the web. It has a large index of web pages and a wide range of power searching commands. It also offers news search, shopping search and multimedia search.

Lycos started out as a search engine, depending on listings that came from spidering the web.  Its main listings come from AllTheWeb.com with some results from the Open Directory project. Lycos also acquired HotBot in 1998, which continues to be run separately.

A meta search engine that is new to the scene. It finds sites rated best by multiple search engines for your search.

Ask Jeeves is a human-powered search service.  You ask questions and it directs you to the pages that answers your question.  Ask Jeeves also uses result from many pay-per-click engines.

WiseNut is another new on the scene search engine. Uses a context sensitive algorithm. It has an index of 1.5 billion pages and the search results are clustered into categories.

Owns easy to use Webcrawler, Excite is a portal that offers a search service including search of a directory from the ODP

To rank well on these sites you'll need you web site optimised so contact us today about search engine optimisation either via the form below or one of our other contact methods.