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Back in the day, it was fun to ask Jeeves random questions. When asked, "What's my favorite color?" Jeeves would produce a list of resources on color charts. Alta Vista would help me translate my French homework while I searched for answers, and Yahoo! seemed to have it all beyond a basic search engine: email, games, a chat client, news, and various other sections of its website that made it a favorite.

And then the clouds broke, and something called Google shined down upon us.

I can't remember exactly when it happened. One day it was just here and everyone was talking about Googling things. Beginning my teaching career, I was mortified to see citation pages that included this:

Google .

Over time it seems that we've become over-reliant upon Google. Today's youth don't even see it as a source from which to obtain information, but moreso the tome of knowledge itself.

Don't get me wrong. Google is a great tool and they have excellent features, but I'm trying to get my students to branch out and see that there's more out there than just Google.

The problem is that many search engines are inconsistent. I might type my name into Google and then go over to Yahoo! only to get different results. Most of us have Googled ourselves at some point, but if I hadn't just hopped over to Yahoo!, I never would have known how much money my Relay for Life team raised or that we even had a webpage. Amazing!

So what's a girl (or guy, as the case may be) in search of knowledge to do? It doesn't seem time-effective to track down every single search engine on the internet and search them all every time just to make sure you have the most comprehensive list of resources available. When it comes down to it, you'll find that many of them, such as answers.com, are powered by Google, anyway. I decided to go hunting for alternatives.

I tried Axioma (www.axioma.com). It was interesting how it broke down how many occurrences of the words in my search there were in all of the results. I was also impressed by the domain breakdown. Often have I told and been told that the most reliable sites don't end in ".com" and that those should therefore be considered with caution. That feature alone was the saving grace when I looked up again and noticed that all of the results were also listed by their Google ranking. Maybe this one isn't as Google-free as I want to be, but it still had some nice features.

Next up was Brainboost.com. This site reminds me a bit of Ask.com in that you ask it questions and it extracts

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