Whenever I read or hear about new search engine, I usually run a vanity test on it - I do a search for my own name. Since I have a general idea of how many of my newspaper, e-zine and Suite101.com columns are available on the Web, I know how what sites and how many ought to show up on a search engine.
The search engines listed below passed that test and, more importantly, have proven to be useful turning up other types of information in a hurry.
It's not complete yet, but it certainly lives up to its name. Hands down, it returns results more quickly than anything on the Web. This new search engine, created by Dell Computers and others, claims to have indexed 80 million sites so far and plans to have 200 million by the summer of '99. The goal is 1 billion URLs. (Could there really be that many out there?) For now, FAST is quick - and largely on-target.
Google http://www.google.com
This one's also new. As it entered its second year, it picked up some heavyweight Silicon Valley folks to serve on its board of directors and received a ton of money to fuel its expansion. (Click on 'More Google' for details.) Google isn't as speedy as FAST, but it's accurate and stacks up well with two of my old favorites, Alta Vista (http://www.altavista.com) and Anzwers (http://www.anzwers).
Chubba http://www.chubba.com
This site, owned and operated by WhatUSeek, is less than a year old at this writing. It's a parallel search engine, sending out a single query to multiple search engines. I still think the best in this class is Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com), but Chubba's no slouch. It searches WhatUSeek, Yahoo!, Hotbot and others, and it's pretty quick about it.
As always, I'm interested in hearing from other readers about search engines they've found useful. If you have a few favorite sites, please tell me about them in an e-mail message or, better yet, post a message in the discussion area at the bottom of the "Welcome" screen.
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