Honorable Mentions: (search engines & directories that received votes or comments, but did not quite make the top 10)
- Mem00ry.com
- A9.com
- Mamma.com
- Ujiko.com
- Business.com
- Completeplanet.com
- Canada.com
- Ithaki.net
- Canoe.ca
- AOL search
Top Search Directory, Number 10: DMOZ.org
USER RATING: 2.3 Stars out of 5To be technically correct, The Open Directory Project (DMOZ.org, formerly NewHoo) is a search "directory", not a search "engine". This means: the content at DMOZ.org is hand-picked by human editors, not by robot programs.
Sponsored by Netscape, and employing 50,000 volunteer experts as editors, the ODP (DMOZ.org) has about 4 million links in its database. Although less than 1% the size of Google, DMOZ.org is packed with helpful hand-picked Internet links that have been filtered by human judgment.
PROS: DMOZ content is hand-picked by subject matter experts; irrelevant content is usually filtered out well.
CONS: Content quality varies with the quality of volunteerism, slow to update, ranking is inconsistent, not good for news or current events content.
USERS' COMMENTS::"good for researching evergreen content, but it's clunky."
EDITOR'S COMMENT: A great philanthropic search idea, but is eclipsed by the money monsters of Yahoo and Google.
Top Search Engine, Number 9: Alltheweb.com
USER RATING: 3.1 Stars out of 5Effectively, Alltheweb.com is the search engine version of Yahoo. Alltheweb.com was originally owned by Overture, which was then bought by Yahoo. Now, Alltheweb allows you to search Yahoo content, but with a spartan look and feel that resembles Google.
PROS: excellent video and photo searching features, clean and fast interface, the designers ask users for relevancy feedback.
CONS: obscured by weak marketing, index is only half the size of Google's.
USERS' COMMENTS:: "Looks like Google". "Clean look". "Fast".
EDITOR'S COMMENT: Yahoo should consider blending this search engine into its existing Yahoo.com name for better branding.
Next: Top Search Engines, Numbers 8 and 7...
