Search engines list

Most people only use a single search engine or two when they need to find something on the web, but there are huge numbers of different search engines out there that index different sites in different ways by different criteria. When your favorite search engine does not find what you need it can be very useful to know of some others that may provide different results.

Here I've collected a list of search engines (and directories) that I personally find useful along with a short description. I hope they can help you find what you are looking for.

Google

Well known, extremely fast, has a huge index. Usually a good first choice. Only about search, no portal type stuff and although they do serve ads they are not too intrusive
It's completely automated, there is no human edited directory of websites like some of the other search engines provide - this is sometimes a slight drawback, although their search is so efficient that you usually don't care.

Yahoo!

Before Google, Yahoo! was probably the best known place to find what you were looking for. These days they have sharp competition.
Yahoo! features a big automated index for their search feature but also provide a huge directory of websites sorted by category that you can browse.
Yahoo also tries to be a general portal site where you can do lots of other stuff besides searching; like buy stuff, play games, see sports results etc.

Open Directory Project

DMOZ, Open Directory Project is a huge directory that attempts to sort links to quality websites into categories. It mainly relies on volunteers to do the cataloging and sorting and the quality of sites in the different categories vary somewhat. It does catalog a huge number of sites though and mostly the quality of sites they list is fairly high.

Live Search

MSN's Live Search is Microsofts take on a search engine. It sometimes finds stuff that I can't find with Google, but mostly my impression is that it just contains a subset of what I can find via Google or Yahoo. It's worth a shot though if you can't find what you are looking for.

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