Search the Web

Search engines! Here are some oldies and some new ones. Only a few of the old ones remain independent, most were bought up by other companies, leaving Google with most of the search market, but there are several others that are worthwhile and deserve a try. Enjoy perusing the list below!

		(formerly MSN Search and LiveSearch)
		Interesting alternative to Google, with emphasis on privacy for your searches
Yes, Jeeves is still around, although he doesn't really look like a butler anymore. Ask Jeeves (www.askjeeves.com) and Teoma (www.teoma.com) are now part of Ask.com	Despite the name, which may turn some people off, it is a useful search engine. And, they changed their logo and the "O" is now a cute paw print, rather than a spiral that resembled a pile of...never mind, you can look search for it under dogpile old logo if you you're interested...	A somewhat different method of searching and may give you more alternatives that you hadn't thought of when you started your search.
An open source search engine and runs off of donations and provides the search engine for a few other web search sites such as ixquick	StartPageor ixquick If you are seeking privacy, they use a proxy that keeps your search results private. StartPage uses Google search but keeps your searches from being saved by Google and identified with you via cookies. The original website, ixquick.eu is still available and is not "Google Enhanced." and complies with the EU privacy standards.	DMOZ at www.dmoz.org DMOZ (ODP, Open Directory Project, GnuWoo, NewHoo), purchased by Netscape, then acquired by AOL was unfortunately closed down on March 17, 2017. It was just about the last of the human-curated search engines (as opposed to Google, for example, which is machine-indexed). It currently lives on as a page with links to the old search results at https://dmoztools.net and is apparently being maintained at a new location as Curlie, although it is currently unclear if this is a similar group of people that maintained DMOZ. Curlie is available at www.curlie.org
The Internet Archive/Wayback Machine The Wayback Machine is useful for viewing archived versions of old web pages, very useful for finding information that was moved or deleted from a website	For geeks and computational enthusiasts, you have to check this one out. Enter what you want computed and, although it may take a while, you get a "computing..." message to let you know it is "thinking" about your problem - and yes, it knows how to divide by zero...	Formerly Clusty, groups your results into topics, rather than just a list of sites by search engine ranking, which can bring you different results that you might not see normally. Not great for searches for obscure scientific terms.
Google Scholar Useful for searching for scholarly articles and scientific publications	AOL Yes, it's still around, no they don't mail out CDs anymore... and I know you wish you had a couple to prop up that wobbly table...
Older sites that were sold and are under new management:
HotBot was sold by Lycos in 2016 to an unamed buyer, and appears to be using Bing as its backend for search results	(AltaVista is now part of Yahoo.com)	(InfoSeek is now part of Go.com, owned by Disney, the link doesn't even go to a search engine anymore, but goes to Disney's website)
(AlltheWeb is now part of Yahoo.com)

Hints on how to use Search engines:
1) Use specific words to make your search more selective and retrieve results that are more relevant
2) Use the minus sign to eliminate certain results. For instance, if you are searching for information about birds, but don't want information about robins, enter birds -robins or if you wanted to search for images of birds, but not include pinterest images, then search for birds -pinterest
3) Words like "a" and "the" are usually ignored, unless they are part of a title and are inside quotes.
4) Use quotes to search for multiple words or a phrase, for instance "President George Washington" will return far more specific results than it would if you leave off the quotes
5) Use Boolean (AND, OR, NOT). For instance, if you want to search for a hotel in New York, you can search for hotel AND "New York"
6) Use the singular form of a word to get results for both the singular and plural. For example, use elephant, not elephants.
7) Capitalization generally does not matter (State is the same as state)
8) If you are using Google, you can use advanced search, such as define: For example, enter define:symphony to see the definition of the word symphony.