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Search engines are the corner stone of the Internet. Without them the Internet couldn't exist. With all of the content on the net today you wouldn't be able to find anything without them.

Today there two type of search engines on the Internet. There is the standard search engines like Google.com, Yahoo.com, and Ask.com. And then there are the Meta search engines like MetaCrawler.com, Search.com, Webcrawler.com.

The difference between the two types is that the standard search engines have their own large database of websites that when you type in your search term the search engine looks into their own database for results.

A meta search engine looks in a number of different databases for the results of a search term that you type in. as an example Metacrawler.com looks in the databases of Google.com, Yahoo.com, Ask.com, and About.com.

Which is the best between the two types? That is hard to say. When you use a meta search engine they look through more databases but are they filtering the information or are you getting all the hits from every database?

There are hundreds of search engines out on the Internet today. I found a site at http://lorien.ncl.ac.uk/ming/R esources/searcheng/search.htm that listed 45 alone.

So how do you know your using the best search engine. Well really there is no way to tell. It really boils down to which one you like the best. Most people consider google.com the number one search engine on the web and I do use Google more then any other but I also use others like Ask.com and Yahoo.com to compare results.

But there are also a lot of people that use Yahoo. And others use Ask. The best thing to do is to start with one search engine and go to others using the same search terms and see which search engine gives you the fest results.

Learn more about this author, Chuck Baker.
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