Which online search engine do you use to find information? According to current statistics the following five engines are used to cover over 99% of all online searches: Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and AOL. Out of these Google is by far the first choice of most surfers, and "Googling" has become irrevocably associated with the Internet as a whole. There are however a lot of alternatives to the search giant. The next time you are looking for information, whether on a specific topic or a general theme, you should go against the current and check out some of the options listed here just for the sake of getting the most of what the World Wide Web has to offer.
Bing (formerly Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search) is a search engine launched by Microsoft in 2009. According to independent research Bing has already acquired roughly 12% of the market since its launch, and the percentage is expected to grow when Bing starts processing Yahoo's requests in autumn 2010. Bing's interface features daily changing images and its search results tend to show little or no spam on the first pages. Try for yourself!
Although Google is still far ahead of Bing in terms of number of users, the competition between them remains a fight between two big fish. To explore less known options web surfers can try the more interactive ChaCha or Anoox. ChaCha is based on a question and answer format; you type in a question and a Guide (a real person who works as an independent contractor for ChaCha) will give you a response. If your question has already been asked you will get a list of previous answers. You can then give the answer thumbs up or thumbs down. Anoox displays machine generated search results, but its users can vote on the relevance of the results. What you will see first will be the pages that users have voted as most relevant to the search word. Interestingly enough the results will not be as objective as you would expect, but you will discover a wide array of sites that you might not have found using a more popular search engine.
Another small engine that takes a completely different approach from ChaCha or Anoox is Wolfram|Alpha. Despite of its lengthy name it is worth looking up. According to its website, Wolfram|Alpha aims to make all objective data in the world immediately computable and accessible to web surfers. The engine contains over 10 trillion pieces of data that it transfers via its own Mathematica code immediately into accurate information. The information can vary from the square root of Pi to the birthday of Elvis, as long as it is objective.
Finally, metasearch engines that allow you to search a variety of search engines at a time are an interesting option too. Dogpile is a metasearch engine that searches Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask simultaneously.
In the end, it is up to you to decide which search engine to use. You should however remember that knowledge is power: there is a lot of information out there and no reason you should not access all of it. The secret is not always to choose the "best" search engine, but to choose a combination of them that will work for you best. [
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