AltaVista - a way of getting rid of duplicate hits from a particular web site when using a search engine is to use AltaVista's advanced search which allows for "site collapse". Near the bottom of the page, turn on (toggle the box to make the check mark appear) the Display option - site collapse (on/off). When Site Collapse is on (box is checked), AltaVista displays a maximum of two results per site. This lets you see many different sites in your results. When Site Collapse is off, AltaVista displays all results from each site, indenting pages from the same site below the first result listed in order of relevance. This makes it easy to see results from deep within sites.

BrainBoost  -  A search engine that allows you to use natural language to ask a question, then retrieves the answer from both the web and recent news.

Collarity  - is a search companion that understands your interest areas, preferences and search experiences. This information is distilled from the complex interaction of keywords and URLs. Collarity then connects you with the successful results of "like minded" communities of searchers and provides contextually relevant results. At the same time, your experience is used to implicitly guide and help others. To get the full benefit of Collarity you need to register (free). If you don't register, Collarity doesn't "learn" about your searching habits, and you are given generic results based on its community of users. (Recommended by A.I.R.)

Copernic - Looking for something quite obscure and only getting a few hits on a couple of search engines? Want to check a number of search engines and yet not see the same hit over and over?
Copernic is a meta search engine that facilitates the search, retrieval and management of internet resources. Rather than web-based, this is software that you download on to your computer. There is a free version that can be downloaded from http://www.copernic.com/download/ .

Daypop is a current events search engine that crawls the living web (newspapers, online magazines, and weblogs*) at least once a day to locate the latest news, the newest movie reviews, or sports results. Over 7500 news sites and weblogs on the net are scanned by Daypop every day. Some of the sources for news included economist.com, newswire.ca, globeandmail.com, and cbc.ca.From the main page you can enter a query and optionally specify whether you want to search news sites, Weblogs, or both. You can search the fulltext or just the title of entries. Search results include the title of a site, brief excerpt, and a cache link (with the cache date which is important). If searching both news sites and weblogs, each item that shows up in your search results has a little icon that marks it as News (N) or Weblog (W). Results can be sorted by date or relevance.

Dogpile  -  Combines results from the four leading search sites - MSN Search, Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves.

Epicasite  -  Visually discover websites by their thumbnails.

Excite - "Excite is one of the most recognized names on the Internet, and among the Internet's most personalized portals featuring a completely customizable start page. Excite features comprehensive search tools, a popular Webmail platform and robust content and resources from over 100 leading providers."

Globalspec  -  Engineering Search Engine - features over 12,500 online catalogues which you can search by keyword or browse by subject category.

KartOO - visually represents results of meta searches. Enter your query (after you've read the help screen!) and click on OK. KartOO then launches the query to a set of search engines, gathers the results, compiles them and represents them in a series of interactive maps arrived at through a proprietary algorithm. The graphic presentation shows the first 10 (or the number you choose) results as balls, its size being proportional to the relative relevance.
You can change the "view" to html to have the results presented in a traditional text format, but try the graphic version it's what sets KartOO apart from the myriad of meta search engines! 

Northern Light - is a combination search engine and periodical guide. More than 330 million Web pages and over 55 million pages of business information, not generally available on the web, are indexed. A major strength of this site is that the results of your search are sorted into topic folders. This feature is particularly helpful when searching a word that is used in various fields, or an acronym. The emphasis is on general interest and business topics, but some scientific and technical journals are covered. (Recommended by A.I.R.)

Soople (which means ‘to soften, make supple’), “softens all the fantastic advanced functions Google offers.” Soople provides a user friendly front end for some of the basic functions of Google, search in the latest news, look up definitions or look in a phone book (U.S. only). You can limit a search by a particular site or file type (Word, Excel, Powerpoint or .pdf), or an image search by size and type. Soople is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Google. So, if want the power of Google, but with a little help, check out Soople.com.

SurfWax - is a metasearch engine - it combines the results of a number of search engines. On waves, surf wax helps surfers grip their surfboard; with web surfing, SurfWax helps you get the best grip on information -- providing the "best use" of relevant search results. SurfWax makes searching a "visual process," integrating meaning-based search with key knowledge-finding elements for effective association and recall. Surfwax offers multiple seamless dimensions for Internet searching. These include FocusWords, Custom SearchSets, SiteSnaps, ContextZooming, and InfoCubby.
A summary is given as to the number of hits found and displayed as well as how many hits were invalid, duplicates or stale. (Recommended by A.I.R.)

Teoma - delivers three types of search results: a) Web Pages: Authoritative sites relevant to search term.
b) Web Pages by Topic: Top result pages are grouped based on their topics. c) Experts' Links: These web pages, created by topic experts around the world, contain a list of site links on related general subjects. In addition, they often categorize and provide editorial comments on the web links they list, serving as information resource pages for the related subjects. (Recommended by A.I.R.)

VisioBrand - enables you to search or browse for 15,000 "official" Web sites instead of a long list of online retailers. Categories in the directory include Food/Beverages, Electronics/Computers, Sports and Pets.

WiseNut - Strengths: a) Ranking: WiseNut's context-sensitive link analysis not only measures the relative importance of a given page, but also determines the relative relevancy of that page for a given query. b) Automatic Categorization: The WiseNut search engine includes features that enable it to present search results in an organized and efficient way. c) Clustering: The WiseNut clustering feature groups all relevant Web pages from the same site under one result. d) WiseGuide automatically generates categories that are semantically related to the words in your query. For very general queries or for words with multiple meanings, this feature can help you quickly find just what you're looking for. (Recommended by A.I.R.)

Yahoo -  Hate all the clutter (read advertising) on their home page? There's a url that gives you a clutter-free Yahoo. So if you haven't "Yahoo'd" for a while, check out the "clean Yahoo". http://dir.yahoo.com/ Other changes: Sites found by your search are arranged by "Inside Yahoo", "Directory Category Matches", "Sponsor Matches", and then "Web Matches". Check out the advanced search screen, especially the "more options" feature which allows you to limit by language, country, date, domain, and even where your keywords are located (in the url, title, etc.) (Recommended by A.I.R.)

Zoominfo  -  People information summarized.

General Information

Chart - Which Search Engine?  -  Phil Bradley has done a great chart. He outlines a type of information (quick factual answer, overview of a subject, academic resources, or geographical sources), and then offers 3 or 4 search engines to consider.

Country Based Search Engines  -  Country search engines and regional search engines

"Deep Content: Guide to Effective Searching of the Internet"  -  If you want to be more effective in your searching of the internet this may be a great place to start. If your patience allows, do the whole tutorial, which is divided in to 12 parts and covers 49 topics. Just a few of the areas covered are an excellent overview of the internet, how ranking works, Boolean basics, and pitfalls to avoid.

Guide to Computer Training:  A great resource about the pros and cons of major search engines and directories. 

How to Choose a Search Engine or Directory  -  Fields & File Types/Search Results/Specialty Searches/Search Logic/Search Options

Search AllinOne MetaSearch  -  Combining the power of all the worlds best search engines into one.

Search Engines Directory - Phil Bradley maintains a web site that lists 2,086 search engines covering 216 countries, territories and regions. The listings are divided over 3 pages with Countries from Global to Dominican Republic on the first page, Easter Island to Ireland on the next and Israel to Zimbabwe on the last. 

Search Engine Features For Searchers  -  Search Features Chart summarizes key search commands and search assistance features.

Search Engines - Ultimate Resources  -  The resources range from the Yahoo and Google directories to the very obscure (pencildude.ca and sasksearch.com)

Search Features Chart - Tired of trying to remember which search engine uses a wildcard * and which ones are case sensitive? A chart summarizing key search commands and search assistance features covers AltaVista, AOL Search, Excite, Go (Infoseek), Google, GoTo, HotBot, iWon (in Search Assistance section), LookSmart, Lycos, MSN Search, Netscape Search, Northern Light, Snap, WebCrawler and Yahoo. (Recommended by A.I.R.)

Search Engines Worldwide   -  A list of global and local search engines sorted by countries in the world.

Specialty Search Engines     -  Arranged by categories