http://searchengineshowdown.com/features/byfeature.shtml

Top Choices from Search Engine Showdown
The search engines below are all excellent choices to start with when searching for information.

Google
http://www.google.com

Yahoo
http://www.yahoo.com

Ask
http://www.ask.com
Ask Jeeves initially gained fame in 1998 and 1999 as being the "natural language" search engine that let you search by asking questions and responded with what seemed to be the right answer to everything.

AllTheWeb.com
http://www.alltheweb.com
Powered by Yahoo, you may find AllTheWeb a lighter, more customizable and pleasant "pure search" experience than you get at Yahoo itself. The focus is on web search, but news, picture, video, MP3 and FTP search are also offered.

AOL Search
http://aolsearch.aol.com (internal)
http://search.aol.com/(external)

AltaVista
http://www.altavista.com
Results come from Yahoo, and tabs above the search box let you go beyond web search to find images, MP3/Audio, Video, human category listings and news results. If you want a lighter-feel than Yahoo but to still have Yahoo's results, AltaVista is worth considering.

Live Search
http://www.live.com/
Live Search (formerly Windows Live Search) is the name of Microsoft's web search engine, successor to MSN Search, designed to compete with the industry leaders Google and Yahoo. The search engine offers some innovative features, such as the ability to view 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 (i.e. just the title, a short summary, or a longer summary). It also allows the user to save searches and see them updated automatically on Live.com.

LookSmart
http://www.looksmart.com
LookSmart is primarily a human-compiled directory of web sites. It gathers its listings in two ways. Commercial sites pay to be listed in its commercial categories, making the service very much like an electronic "Yellow Pages." However, volunteer editors at the LookSmart-owned Zeal directory also catalog sites into non-commercial categories for free and its listings are integrated into LookSmart's results.

HotBot
http://www.hotbot.com
Another commercial site makes paid for advertised services freely available to searchers.

Lycos
http://www.lycos.com
Lycos is one of the oldest search engines on the web, launched in 1994. w/ access to human-powered results from LookSmart for popular queries and crawler-based results from Yahoo for others.

http://www.mamma.com
This is another yellow and white pages on the web w/ video/image search capability alike Google.

Netscape Search
http://search.netscape.com
The main difference between Netscape Search and Google is that Netscape Search will list some of Netscape's own content at the top of its results. Netscape also has a completely different look and feel than Google.

Open Directory
http://dmoz.org/
Try Winging your search results!
The Open Directory uses volunteer editors to catalog the web.

http://dir.webring.com
A webring in general is a collection of websites from around the Internet and joined categorically.

Other Global Search Engines
Other services cover the world but end up with any kind of result list. They may not be as popular or well-known as the services above, but they may still be helpful.

Community-Based Search Engines
Places where volunteers are involved in the listing process such as on dmoz.org.
Usual lists are of Schools, Businesses and News.

Directional Guides to Multiple Search Engines:

SearchIQ http://www.zdnet.com/searchiq/
Search engine reviews, tutorials and a directory of specialty search engines here.

Skworm
http://www.skworm.com/ A nice guide to search engines has the ability to query from the same page.

CUI W3 Search Engines
http://cui.unige.ch/meta-index.html
One of the oldest all-in-one guides to major services and specialty services, with the ability to query directly from the page.

AllSearchEngines.com
http://www.allsearchengines.com/
The name says it all -- links to all search engines, or at least a whole lot! Browse categories to find search engines, don't search. Searching simply brings back general results from a paid listings search engine.

Big Search Engine Index
http://www.search-engine-index.co.uk/ Hundreds of search engines organized into categories.

DirectoryGuide
http://www.siteowner.com/dgdefault.cfm
Hundreds of search engines and directories, organized into categories. Use the guide to find a likely service for your search, or follow links to post information about your web site.

Indicateur
http://www.indicateur.com
Directory of search engines is written in French.

SearchBug.com
http://www.searchbug.com
Collection of search and reference sites, ranging from reverse phone number searches to package tracking, as well as covering the major search engines.

Search Engine Colossus
http://www.searchenginecolossus.com
International directory of search engines covers up to 351 countries in many languages.