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There are a few problems, not exactly about Google itself, but because of it, you see, most schools now have blocked Google images, so where do you turn for an image search?

You could use Ask.com I've used it at my school, and it still works fine, of course the schools may have blocked it this year as well, so there's always yahoo.com, alexa.com, Exalead, Gigablast, Live Search, mozDex, and wisenut.

Ask.com, originally known as Ask Jeeves, the idea behind it was for people to pose questions in everyday normal language. Ask.com can search for answers to questions asked in plain speech, as well as the normal keyword searches. This is a very handy tool fotr when you don't know how to phrase a keyword search.

alexa.com is actually a subsidiary of Amazon.com, it is best known for providing information on the web traffic to other websites. Alexa gathers information from users who have installed the Alexa Toolbar, allowing them to provide statistics on web site traffic, and lists of related links.

Exalead is a French search engine providing thumbnail previews of the targeted pages as well as the results, and has advanced refinement of the resulting pages (language, geographic location, file type, categories) plus further data refinement, such as rich content (audio, video, RSS) and related terms.

Gigablast is designed to be index a high number of webpages per server, and while Gigablast Inc. says it has succeeded in this area, the engine doesn't have all the options of many other search engines, the most notable among them being the lack of an image search and the lack of special tools to bring targeted results for a user. However, it does feature Gigabits, where the engine guesses related keywords from a search query and places them at the top of the results page. Another feature is the Gigablast toolbar for Internet Explorer.

Live Search, formerly known as Windows Live Search , is designed to compete with the industry leaders Google and Yahoo!. Live Search is accessible through Microsoft's Live.com and MSN web portal. This new search engine offers some innovative new features, such as it's capability of viewing additional search results on the same web page (instead of needing to click through to subsequent search result pages) and the ability to adjust the amount of information displayed for each search-result. It also allows the user to save searches and see them updated automatically on Live.com.

mozDex provides an open search engine, its searches are open to ensure that search results are not manipulated by either mozDex as a company or anybody else. As such, instead of having to trust mozDex to be fair, it puts the trust on the community of users through a peer review process that is believed to enhance security of Free Software.

Wisenut is a crawler-based search engine now owned by Looksmart. WiseNut introduced a fresh database and relevant hits. WiseNut automatically clusters search results, a technology called WiseGuide. However, it lacks boolean search in the standard search and other advanced search features. Unlike other search engines, WiseNut does not cache pages. Looksmart now owns the search engine. Despite delivering good relevancy and having a large database of over 1.5 billion URIs, WiseNut remains a small player.

Learn more about this author, Samhain Whitefox.
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