AltaVista is consistently the largest search engine on the web, in terms of pages indexed. The "Ask AltaVista" feature processes natural language queries through a database of 6 million template questions. There is also an AV Photo Finder, which indexes 10 million photos, illustrations and artwork from the Web and from a set of premiere collections, searchable by keyword. As an alternative, try Raging Search.

AskJeeves At Ask Jeeves, you may ask questions on the Internet in the same way you would of a friend or colleague. Jeeves then retrieves the information, drawing from an extensive knowledgebase of millions of answers to the most frequently asked questions. Ask Jeeves allows you to ask your question in plain English without entering keywords or boolean search strings and Jeeves provides a concise list of answers with their exact location, instead of an exhaustive list of matches.

Excite lists sites in one of three ways: Excite Search, Channels By Excite, and Excite NewsTracker. Excite Search taps into the traditional search engine listings, created by crawling the web. Channels By Excite lists sites by topics. These sites have been approved by editors, and sometimes also have reviews. Also included are channels on subject information, discussions areas, and more. Excite NewsTracker allows searching of listings generated by crawling specialty news sites.

Go Network, powered by InfoSeek, claims to have the largest group of web sites organized by topic. Advanced search options available for limiting query to usenet, people, companies, stocks, news, shareware, and reference. Sites are listed by topic, and editors pick which sites appear.

Google is a very simple way to search the Internet, without ads or graphics customarily associated with megaportals. Google has revolutionized searching on the web with its patent-pending PageRankTM technology. PageRank leverages the structural nature of the web, which is defined by the way in which any web page can link to any other web page, instantly, directly, and without an intermediary. 

HotBot another large collection of web sites, HotBot allows searching by geographic location or language. HotBot allows searchers to select from a number of different fields and drop-down lists to build search criteria. HotBot also includes categorized content channels.

iLOR offers four different ways to search. iLOR assists users in the actual navigating of their searches, rather than simply presenting a long list of "potential" results that must be sifted through.

Lycos provides options to search for pictures or sounds and offers useful Web Guides. Provides the Top 5% reviews of what's best on the web. Reviews can be browsed or searched, and they can be sorted by review date, content, design, overall experience, or alphabetical order.

WebCrawler allows searching for terms in adjacency order. Provides an associated directory of reviewed sites, WebCrawler Select, and classified advertisements on the web.

Yahoo! is the oldest and largest web site directory (as opposed to a search engine). The Yahoo directory is based on user submissions. If a search fails to find a match within Yahoo's own listing, matches from the Inktomi search engine are displayed. Inktomi matches appear after all Yahoo matches have been listed.