In the beginning, most search engines were terrible. Fortunately, that situation has changed. Here is a list of the best search engines and a bit about them.
List of Best Search Engines

In its infancy, the search engine was a humble beast on the Internet. Most engines didn’t have a clue about how to return relevant rankings. This led to user dissatisfaction and many of the search engines disappeared or become small players such as Alta Vista, Lycos and Northern Lights. Much of this occurred when Google came on the scene.

Defining what “best” means can be a hazardous affair, but Google is the best or close to the best in most areas. The creation of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company started in 1988 and was originally known as BackRub. The name came from the new idea of looking at links as a measure of relevancy when returning search results. Google has deemphasized back links, but still controls massive traffic. It is by far the best advertising platform for businesses and the most used platform by people looking for things. Google also supplies search and advertising results to AOL among other search engines.

Yahoo is one of the original search engines that has managed to stay in the game. In truth, Yahoo has never had much to shout about as a search engine. Results are often not particularly relevant to the search, but it has improved significantly by more or less trying to do what Google does when ranking sites. Yahoo denies this, but the search results don’t lie.

Where Yahoo has made its mark is in ancillary services. The site was one of the first to offer free email accounts, which gave it a captive audience of hundreds of million users. It also spread its business into other money making areas such as personals, pay-per-click advertising and a yahoo chat groups. Whereas Google focuses primarily on search engine issues, Yahoo spreads its wings far and wide on the net. One example of this is the relationship Yahoo has formed with other search engines. Simply put, it provides search results to a number of other search engines, such as Alta Vista, so it controls far more traffic than most people think. Yahoo is not as good as Google, but definitely is the second best search engine out there.

MSN is the little search engine that could. While it may seem odd to suggest a search engine offered by Microsoft is an underdog, this is definitely the case on the web. To put it bluntly, Microsoft missed the mark when it first launched MSN.com. The results were horrible and nobody used it. In 2005, Microsoft finally got its act together and launched an entirely new MSN search engine. Surprisingly, I consider it at the top of the list for best search engines. Yes, better than Google. The results are highly relevant to the search, which is good for surfers and sites. The problem, of course, is MSN is way behind the game when it comes to attracting traffic. Still, it seems to have figured out the search engine game at last.

Looking at this list of best search engines on the web, you are probably wondering why others aren’t included. Simply put, most of them are just fronts for results provided by Google, Yahoo or MSN. Dogpile, for instance, is very popular, but it simply compiles the search results of the big three search engines to form its search results. Similarly, AOL is essentially just using Google search results. The list goes on and on.

Any list of the best of something is going to controversial. When it comes to a list of the best search engines, the top three are indisputable.

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