Internet Searches
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Search Engines

Ask.com
Ask performs best when given shopping and business queries. It does not do as well with simple keyword searches. Given a natural-language query, Ask answers with a short list of similar questions for you to ask instead of your original question. The service has answers to its own questions, but its list of questions often misses the point.
All The Web
 FAST Search performs impressively on very focused queries. Unfortunately, it has a tendency to bring up numerous pages from the same site, and unlike some other search engine, it offers no way to group such results.
Google
 Google focuses solely on searching. Fast and with a spare interface, Google consistently turns up high-quality, highly relevant results. Google does well on both specific queries and broad-topic searches. It's also has a high accuracy rate for targeting specific home pages.
Northern
Lights
 Whether you need an answer to a highly specific query or to a general keyword search, Northern Light may be your best option. Using a unique custom-folders feature and natural-language engine, the site often answers queries with numerous relevant results while some sites have trouble supplying one.

Directories
Direct Search is a compilation of links to resources that contain data not easily or entirely searchable/ accessible from general search tools. Direct Search finds material "hidden" from the general search tools.
LookSmart is a global leader in Internet search infrastructure, dedicated to helping people find useful information quickly.
MP3.com is designed to facilitate the storage, management, promotion, and delivery of digital music. It hosts one of the largest collections of digital music available on the Internet.
The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. The Open Directory is the most widely distributed data base of Web content classified by humans. It powers the core directory services for the Web's largest and most popular search engines and portals.
Yahoo! handles general searches with aplomb, but complex and natural-language queries are best taken elsewhere. Few tools are provided for refining searches. Although still a solid offering, Yahoo! has failed to keep pace with some of its competitors.

Portals
AltaVista's strength is its advanced search capabilities: For sheer power and flexibility, you can't beat it. Unfortunately, AltaVista's content isn't fresh enough to make it a first-choice search engine.
Excite.com falls squarely in the middle of the search-engine pack. It's a perfectly adequate search engine and Web directory, but it lacks the power and accuracy of some others. Excite.com has some useful extras, such as a handy news search and specialized searches for photos and audio/video.
For complex, carefully targeted Web searches, HotBot, owned by Lycos, is one of the more accommodating search engines. HotBot provides an impressive number of ways to specify what you seek and where to find it.
Lycos's main strength is its depth of search results, which include the four most popular Web sites, determined by user-selection traffic and listed before other Web hits. Results may also yield links to related searches, news articles, or shopping sites.

Metasearch Engines
Dogpile identifies and retrieves as many records from search engines as are retrieved when those engines are searched individually. Dogpile tries to translate queries into the nearest similar syntax for each target engine. This works well under some circumstances, but not others.
IxQuick searches several major engines and ranks results primarily based on how many engines list the site as a "top 10". This metasearch tool covers more of the major search engines than most, and also allows searching of news, MP3, and image sources.
Though it's one of the oldest metasearch engines MetaCrawler remains a strong player. It covers most major search engines and offers an impressive selection of query-customization options, though you'll need to go to the power-search page to use them.
Search.com provides a gateway to more than 800 search engines, directories, and other reference tools. Access to the full collection is provided through a directory on its home page; categories of searches are grouped on the page that opens from the "Advanced" option next to the search field.