In this concluding part on search engine series, we present a status report on major search engines - dead and live. In the fast changing world of Internet where search engines and portals go through rapid and unpredictable life cycle - a headcount once a while is very helpful for keeping one's search arsenal in top gear. Let us not waste time in chasing wrong tools.

Major Search Engines

(In alphabetical order)

Spider Based Search Engines

• AllTheWeb http://www.alltheweb.com 
•  AltaVista http://www.altavista.com
• AOL Search http://search.aol.com/ 
•  Ask Jeeves http://www.askjeeves.com
• Google http://www.google.com
• HotBot http://www.hotbot.com
• Inktomi http://www.inktomi.com
• Lycos http://www.lycos.com
• MSN Search http://search.msn.com
• Netscape Search http://search.netscape.com

Directories

• Britannica http://www.britannica.com/ 
• LookSmart http://www.looksmart.com 
• The Open Directory (Dmoz) http://dmoz.org/
• Yahoo! http://www.yahoo.com/

Meta Search Engines

• Dogpile: http://www.dogpile.com
• Excite http://www.excite.com/
• Metacrawler http://www.metacrawler.com
• Webcrawler http://www.webcrawler.com/

Dead or Defunct Search Engines

• Deja.com http://www.deja.com Defunct Usenet search Now replaced by http://groups.google.com/ 
• Direct Hit - http://www.directhit.com Literally dead - does not respond 
• Excite http://www.excite.com/ Defunct, now a meta search engine 
• Magellan - http://www.magellan.com Dead ! literally - does not even respond
• Webcrawler - http://www.webcrawler.com/ Is now a meta-search engine. 
• Northern Light - http://www.northernlight.com/ Publicly defunct as a Web search engine, but still available for paid document searching.
• Infoseek http://www.infoseek.com Defunct, bought by Disney for Go, then abandoned in favor of Overture