This is a far-from-exhaustive collection of tools, and represents those
which I myself use, or have at least looked at and made note of.
Search engines
General-purpose
- Google
- startpage gives
Google search results but with privacy protection
-
DuckDuckGo
doesn’t track users; gets
search results from crowdsourced sites (e.g., Wikipedia) and through
partnerships with other search engines
(ref)
- search.ask.com
Multiple
This section was last updated in 2006.
- ixquick.com
presents ranked top-ten results from up to 14 search engines,
supposedly handles different syntaxes well, including Boolean
operators
- MetaCrawler
searches multiple search engines, hits are nicely integrated;
34 hits for "tympanic membrane"
- Dogpile
searches 14 engines, hits are not integrated; 1516 hits
for "tympanic membrane"
- Pandia metasearch;
hits are well integrated
- MetaFind searches 6 engines,
results integrated and sorted; many hits for "tympanic membrane"
- Mamma; hits well
integrated, searches 10 sources; 42 hits for "tympanic membrane"
- Ask Jeeves!; tries
to interpret the request as one of several million previously
asked questions to which
it has 'best' answers, otherwise
falls back to a
conventional 5-engine multiple search (not integrated); 36 hits
for "tympanic membrane"
Medical
This section was last updated in 2004.
- List of
medical search engines
from Search Engine Watch
- Medical World Search -
uses NLM's UMLS to
index information and to supply synonyms for searches;
requires paid membership
- MedHunt -
run by the
Health on the Net Foundation,
an international not-for-profit organisation based in
Geneva; 47 hits for tympanic membrane
- Medscape includes many services
(free Medline, e-mailing of review articles,
specialized home pages, etc.)
in addition to search engine of their own site;
requires free registration;
run by WebMD Inc.
- eMedicine - includes
specially written content and a search engine
- MedExplorer - run
by a paramedic in Alberta; 0 hits for tympanic membrane
- MDchoice.com includes searching of
content ‘selected by board-certified physicians’
Other general-purpose
This section was last updated in 2006.
- dmoz (the Open Directory project) at
dmoz.org, indexed by 10's
of 1000's of human volunteers; directory is used as basis
of many other subject directories, including Google,
Netscape Search, AOL Search, Lycos, HotBot, etc., and
the entire directory can be downloaded for free
- The WWW Virtual Library at
www.vlib.org: claims to be
the oldest catalogue of the Web; non-commercial, run by a loose
confederation of volunteers
Lists and reviews
Examples of hardwired searches
These are searches for the word 'melanoma' using various search engines.
R. Funnell
Last modified: 2017-02-22 11:18:50