Gigablast and Lycos are promising search engines


Gigablast

This is a site everyone should look at. Gigablast debuted in 2002 and it offers some really nice features. It says it has more than 273 million pages indexed, so it is large, but not quite on the scale of Google, AlltheWeb or Inktomi. It does not have many advanced features, but it does offer cached pages, and you can search PDFs and other file formats. It also offers all kinds of field searching options including link: and site:.

Link Searching brings you back all the links tied to the targeted site, while site searching brings you all the pages from a specific website.

One unique feature is its date search that clearly displays the date it crawled a web page and the date reported by the web page at the time it was crawled. Unfortunately that does not really help researchers narrow down to the date of creation, but it does get a step closer.

Another of Gigablast's features is something they call Gigabits. It reads your results, then makes categorizes the common groupings it finds in its results - a sort of clustering.

Unlike all the other search engines, the default search setting on Gigablast was an OR operator. Most search tools use an AND operator. That all changed in 2004 when Gigablast joined the crowd by switching to the use of AND as their default.

Lycos

When it was launched in 1994, Lycos was one of the first search engines on the World Wide Web. Lycos has gone through a series of ups and downs, different owners and several re-inventions. Now it uses a search engine crawler with results from AlltheWeb and its directory is from the Open Directory. What makes it useful are its unique features.

Its most recent addition is what it calls "Sidesearch," allowing you to view its results and do a quick comparison without leaving your browser. This is particularly useful when doing product shopping comparisons.

This is similar to some of the "preview" pages found on a few of the meta-search tools. The company is owned by Terra Lycos, a company formed when Lycos and Terra Networks merged in October, 2000.

Lycos has extensive directory and content resources, including local content from more than a dozen countries. Among Lycos' Advanced Search tools are ways to limit searches by words, URLs or sites, and languages.

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This article was sent to us by: Matt Richards at 08282010

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