Top Search Engines and Directories

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Education for Beginners on How to Find and Use Them

Now that you know what search engines are and how to use them, let's take a look at the top engines on the WWW today. The engines listed below receive on average one or two million visitors per day! This enormous volume of visitors enables them to sell advertising for big bucks, while offering their search capabilities to us for free. You can use any of these top search engines to find what you are looking for, but some engines work better than others, depending on what you are looking for (see the discussion of some specific pros and cons below). Instead of using the close box like we did before, use the "Back" button near the top left of this window to return to this page if you follow any of the links below.

Notice the separation between search engines and directories in the table above. All of these top sites are commonly referred to as "search engines," but an important distinction is made between search engines and directories.

The first set of sites listed are true search engines and are correctly called "deep" search engines. These devices get their name from the fact that they send out "spiders" or "robots" to read each page that is submitted to their database. These automated crawlers typically work 24 hours a day, following links to index every individual page on a site, thereby going "deep" into every site. They also follow links to other sites, index every page on that site, etc. These top search engines consequently have the largest databases, since they index every individual page. What this means to you is that, if you are looking for an obscure or uncommon topic, a deep search engine is your best bet to find it.

Directories' defining characteristic is their organization into a hierarchy of categories. Searchers click down this hierarchy, from general to specific, to find a category of sites that fits their particular search (they can also use the search box to find an appropriate category or site within the directory). In contrast to deep search engines, directories do not use spiders. Instead, they rely on humans to review web sites. Furthermore, they usually list only home pages, not every page within a site, so directories have much smaller databases, typically one hundredth the size (or less) of deep search engines. Through their selective human review process, directories aim for quality rather than quantity. They are great to use if you are looking for a less obscure topic, or a well known company, for instance.

During 1999, most of the deep search engines also added directories to their home pages, due to the success of this model, as demonstrated by Yahoo. Alta Vista, one of the oldest deep search engines, became in October 1999 the latest site to add the Open Directory hierarchy of categories to its home page (Netscape Search, HotBot, Lycos, and AOL Search did so previously). Yahoo, a directory, has long done the reverse, supplementing its search results with a deep search engine, most recently with a behind-the-scenes engine called Inktomi.

Yahoo! is still the acknowledged King of the search engine world, but the younger Open Directory is emerging as an important alternative to Yahoo's reign, because Yahoo's staff of 150+ paid reviewers can't keep up with submissions and site reviews the way the Open Directory's army of volunteer editors (over 19,000 strong in November 1999) does. The fact that five top search engines have supplemented their sites with the Open Directory (see above) amplifies the importance of this alternative. Already, the Open Directory's database, over 1.1 million sites in November 1999, is rivaling Yahoo's library of about 1.3 million sites, and catching up fast. For up to date data on directory database and staff sizes, see the Directory Sizes page at searchenginewatch.com.

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