Name of Site: KartOO
URL: www.kartoo.com
Load Time: Slow
Ease of Navigation: Signposted
Plug Ins Required: Flash
Review: When you think of search engines you think of rather drab lists of results in plain text running down the page waiting for you to scroll them all, but with Kartoo those of us who are more visually oriented finally have an alternative! As a "meta-search engine" KartOO actually uses a combination of other popular search engines to produce its results. Once the magic genie has done his work, your results are displayed in a nifty Flash interface as a visual map, showing a site's relative importance by size. Moreover the results also show relationships between sites and keywords, and not just the keywords you searched for but related ones as well. While a little slower, KartOO is definitely a new spin on the old search premise and hopefully bringing us one step closer to the way Tom Cruise was searching in Minority Report. - SS
Name of Site: Google
URL: www.google.com
Load Time: Scorching
Ease of Navigation: Walk in the Park
Plug Ins Required: None
Review: It's a strange thing when a new word enters the common lexicon, especially when the word is so inherently strange. The phenomonally popular search engine is so widely used that the American Dialect Society voted the neologism "to google" as the most useful word of 2002. So how good is Google? Well let's just say a Google search checks almost 3.5 billion pages for matches, using a matrix of about 10,000 computers to do the hunting. Google also offers a variety of other services including toolbars, Google Groups, Google Answers, News, directories, translating and more. Of course you may try to escape the clutches of Google and use another search engine, but beware even such famous names as Yahoo make use of Google for their results. - SS
Name of Site: Ask Jeeves
URL: www.ask.com
Load Time: Scorching
Ease of Navigation: Walk in the Park
Plug Ins Required: None
Review: The premise to 'Ask Jeeves' is that instead of typing in a cryptic query string you can simply type in a plain English gramatically correct question and get the results you are looking for. Ask Jeeves is actually quite clever and recognizes the context of your search to provide additional searches, checks for word order of your sentences and of course removes question words to find the keywords you are interested in. But for all these frills, Ask Jeeves is really still a regular search engine with some quirky packaging and not the revolutionary breakthrough one would hope, because in the end it is the search results you are after, over and above a nifty way of asking for them. - SS
Name of Site: Search Engine Watch
URL: www.searchenginewatch.com
Load Time: Normal
Ease of Navigation: Need a Map
Plug Ins Required: None
Review: You may be wondering why anyone would want to watch a search engine in this age of bungee jumping and snow boarding. Where's the thrill? You'd be surprised to know that there is a whole race of humans out there who get their adrenaline rush from seeing themselves on page one of Google - webmasters. It's like the hit parade of the new millennium. SearchEngineWatch provides guides to optimizing sites, articles about the search engine market and plenty of information about using them to market your web business. It ain't pretty, it's fairly dry and academic, but as a definitive resource on beating the search engines you can't go past SearchEngineWatch. - SS
Name of Site: Atomz
URL: www.atomz.com/search
Load Time: Normal
Ease of Navigation: Walk in the Park
Plug Ins Required: None
Review: It's all very well searching the web but what if you want to just search one specific website? Or more importantly what if you want to put a search engine on your own website? Hmmm, sounds like some tricky programming would be involved right? Wrong! Sign up with Atomz's free, scaled-back version of Atomz Search and you can very quickly integrate basic search capabilities into your own personal website...without coding anything. There's no real drawbacks to the free version except that you can only catalog sites with up to 500 pages, but if you have more than that you're probably a professional anyway. So sign up today and let your visitors find all your cats, dogs and holiday destinations from the past 10 years with ease. - SS
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