The services below are all well-known and well-used search engines. These are the top search engines and directories. For webmasters, these services are the most important places to be listed. For searchers, these search engines generally offer more dependable results than the lesser-known ones.

Some of these services crawl the web. Others, like Open Directory and Yahoo are "directories" that depend on humans to manage their listings. Most services below offer both search engine and directory information, though they will predominately feature one type of results over the other. Often a search engine will present results from another search engines when it does not have sufficient content within its own database (Example: Yahoo offers data from Google)

Check out the How Search Engines Work page to find out more about the difference between search engines and directories.

Google: http://www.google.com

Google must have about the largest collection of web pages of any crawler-based search engine. It is a widely praised site for the relevancy of search results. It also offers searching of images and Usenet discussions.

Yahoo: http://www.yahoo.com

Yahoo is the web's most popular search service. It has an excellent reputation which is well-deserved. Yahoo supplements its results with those from Google.

Ask Jeeves: http://www.askjeeves.com

Ask Jeeves is a orientated towards asking questions. You type your question and Ask Jeeves tries to direct you to the exact answers.

AllTheWeb: http://www.alltheweb.com

One of the largest indexes of the web. Results are also provided to numerous portals.

AltaVista: http://www.altavista.com

AltaVista is one of the oldest search engines on the web. It also offers news, shopping search and multimedia searches.

AOL Search: http://search.aol.com

AOL allows its members to search its own content and the web via its search enginge. Search allows its members to search across the web and AOL's own content from one place. However the "external" version, listed here does not offer AOL content.

HotBot: http://www.hotbot.com

Offers a mix of results. Initial results are from Direct Hit and then secondary results come from the Inktomi search engine.

LookSmart: http://www.looksmart.com

LookSmart is directory of web sites which means that it is edited by humans. At also provides results to Excite, MSN Search, and many others. When a search fails to find a match LookSmart displays results from Inktomi.

Lycos: http://www.lycos.com

Lycos also uses the directory model (i.e. maintained by humans).

MSN Search: http://search.msn.com

Gets its results from LookSmartand Inktomi.

Netscape Search: http://search.netscape.com

Netscape Search's gets results from their own "Smart Browsing" database, Open Directory and from Google.

Open Directory: http://dmoz.org/

The Open Directory is managed by volunteer editors. Provides results to Netscape (who own Open Directory), AOL (who own Netscape!), Google and Lycos.