The following is my review on 8 separate search engines. But, wait! Where's Google?! Why don't you have Google in your reviews?! I know, I know. Google is the mother of all things on the internet and must be included, right? Well, our instructions are to not use Google in this review. Though, in reality, does anyone really need a review for Google? Don't we all know that it's the best? I'll compare the others by using Google as the gold standard. Alright, moving on to the other 8 search engines.
Yahoo!
Everyone with a working knowledge of the internet should be fairly familiar with Yahoo!. It actually was founded before Google. It works in the same way as Google. It has a search bar and you simply type in what you want. It has an auto-fill feature and displays results in the same format as Google. They are essentially clones of each other. Yahoo! can be used to search for just about anything and will yield good results. It is a solid competitor to Google.
Bing
Bing is probably the next best known engine. It is newer, having just been released at the end of last decade. It is very similar to Yahoo! and Google. It has the same type of search bar with auto-fill feature. It also has the same layout to display search results. Essentially, this is an equivalent of the other top engines previously mentioned. It has great results and is easy to navigate. One could use this engine to search for pretty much anything, as well.
Ask
Ask is another popular search engine, albeit less than the previous ones, with a pretty solid reputation. Modeled much like the others, it is very efficient. It has a "Q&A" section on the right hand column that prompts possible questions to whatever the search criteria was. I find this feature to be useful when searching for a specific answer to a question, not just information on a topic. It would have to be a simple question, as the answers provided don't go in depth.
SearchAll
SearchAll is a engine I have never heard of until about 5 minutes ago. It has a search bar, but it does not auto-fill. Which I found to be rather annoying. It displays the search results is the same basic way as a Google or Yahoo!. It has a related searches feature and a recent searches feature. This site isn't really ascetically pleasing. Not that that has anything to do with its capabilities, but in today's age it is important to please the eye. SearchAll is a lesser version of a search engine. One could find everything it could get from here, but in much better quality, on any of the above mentioned sites.
DogPile
DogPile is a search engine that provides results from Google and Yahoo!. It is has a related searches feature and "Are you looking for?" feature. It has the typical search bar, but it does not auto-fill. This site is more atheistically pleasing than SearchAll and seems to provide some higher quality search results. Yet, the results are all provided by Google and Yahoo!, so it would seem more logical to go to each of those sites first. DogPile is one of the search engines that will give you a link to whatever information you are trying to look for.
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is another search engine of which I had not heard. It is the better of the unknown ones about which I have written so far. It has an auto-fill feature in its search bar. It has a "news" feature at the top of the results page that links to recent articles containing the search topic. This is a really cool feature. This would be a great site to look up news on for a specific topic from multiple news sources at one time.
Lycos
Lycos is a search engine that yields results in the same fashion as some of the "big boys." It has a search bar, but does not auto-fill. It has a large database and appears to work very proficiently. It offers an image search section, much like Google, and is very compatible with most searches I tried. Lycos also opens up the chosen link in a new tab. I don't like this, but that's a personal preference. I would use this engine, but it would be at the bottom of my list.
WolframAlpha
This is another engine that I have never heard of before a few minutes ago. It markets itself as a "computational knowledge engine." I think that is the perfect description. It has a search bar with auto-fill function on its homepage, but that's where most of the similarities end. The search results don't provide links with mentions of the searched word or words, but with information pertaining to the searched word or words. It's really fascinating; I have yet to experience a site like this. When the search bar is given a general topic, such as "football", it returns multiple secondary search bars for more specific and related topics, such as "football player" or "football teams". This is an excellent site to get reliable information about any topic, not a site to find a site that has the information for which one is looking. This was, by far, the most interesting site I visited for this project.
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