mundane search engine is redeemed by its extensive advanced search and multimedia search options. Image and video searches on Google provide more results but fewer ways to filter those results. While not currently offered on Google, AltaVista also provides search results for audio files.
Axioma Search (www.axioma.com) is significantly different from other search engines, but has many redeeming characteristics. First of these is a useful task pane at the bottom of the page that lists related words and lets you display the results by specific page and domain types. Additionally, a narrowing feature allows you to insert a filter to the search while retaining the total list of results. Axioma also allows you to search within each resultant site, granting insight into the pertinence of each result.
ChaCha (www.chacha.com), a search engine that claims to be a 'People Powered Search,' seems to provides a similar design to that of Google. Where Google displays a listing of sponsored results, ChaCha shows related searches. Sponsored results seem to be intermingled with the normal results, but each result identifies itself as either sponsored, ChaCha recommended, or simply as a web address. While the results are limited to a much smaller listing than that of Google, the true power of this search engine lies in its 'chat live with a guide' option, where another person researches the search topic and posts results for you.
The Clusty search engine (www.clusty.com), more accurately defined as a metasearch engine, compiles the results of the top search engines and lists them comparatively. While this may or may not include Google itself, the most important component of Clusty is not where the results are generated from, but rather how they are used. Clusty conveniently compiles clusters of information, taking like results and grouping them together. These clusters can be found on the left hand side of the page, along with two additional features: a list of groups by source and a list of groups by site type. Like the Ask search engine, sponsored results are listed both above and below the regular results, freeing the side of the page and allowing for the useful clustering tool.
Microsoft Live Search (www.live.com) provides a slightly smaller result listing than the Ask search engine. Sponsors are located both above and beside search results, but those on the side fall beneath a list of related searches. Live Search's advanced options allow you to filter results through additional
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