The battle of the Search Engines: How many do we need? What Search Engine Should I use?

One of the most important pages you need to find your way on the Internet is a search engine. With it you can type what you are looking for and get results that might be of use for you or try a different set of words.

The search engine is many times together with a web portal. In the same page you can either type what you are looking for or navigate the various options that are there for you. Those might include news, email, shops...

Yahoo is one of these examples. There are loads of information and options for you once you open the Yahoo website. Other search engines only give you the search box and the search button. You type what you want and press search...than, the whole world will come to you. Cuil is one of these examples.

Then you have Google. Google is both, you can just have the search box (ok, a couple more things around but not much) or log in to your iGoogle and have all the widgets you want together with your search engine.

I know that things are not as straight forward as I mentioned, it is just a rough idea of what search engines look like once you get into them. :)

Personally I'm a Google user. So, when asked how many search engines I need the answer is: 1 (Google)

With it you can do everything...have it simple or set it up your way, great maps, images, videos, conversion and many many labs to use... it is Great.

If you are more on the let's try something else here are the alternatives.

Microsoft's Bing just came out of Beta version. Why not give it a go? http://www.bing.com/

Cuil was created by people that worked at google so it might be worth checking out what they have tried to do in a different way. http://www.cuil.com/

Yahoo is a great portal. (and working on big improvements) If you are looking to give a daily check of the world it might be for you. http://www.yahoo.com/

And then there is specific search engines.

Wolfram Alpha was big news the day it came out. It is revolutionary in terms of the concept. Wolfram is a Computer Knowledge Engine. It does not find website, it gives you the information you want straight away. Try to type a name of a country or city and you will be told what you might need to know. http://www.wolframalpha.com/

There are even a search engine for Cures. Yes, that is right, if you are sick or need to know some medical information why not to try Quest for Cures? http://questforcures.com/

A search engine that might be of good use to academics and students is Scirus. This is a search engine for scientific articles. http://www.scirus.com/

Well, you might want to suggest more search engines to be added to this hub but just in case here goes a list of search engines I didn't mention before:

20SEARCH
ALL THE WEB
ALTA VISTA
AOL SEARCH
ASK JEEVES
DOGPILE
EXCITE
GIGABLAST
IWON
JOEANT
LYCOS
MAMMA
NETSCAPE
OPEN DIRECTORY
WEBCRAWLER
WIKIPEDIA