Halloween

If you are bored, go to --
Halloween dot com --

http://www.halloween.com/

Cuil

Cuil is not cool as a search engine. It is advertising and little else.

The above is the review I would have given a year ago. They have cleaned up their act a little. And the results page is appealing to the eye. Rather nice actually.

But they flunked my test phrase (like Google did also).

Still have to give them decent marks for very improved because I know how bad they were.

127 billion web pages? Isn't Google up around one trillion?

Cuil --
http://www.cuil.com/

Exalead

Exalead once bragged that it would have more pages than Google. Like Godzilla, size matters with search engines. I started using Google for no other reason than because I heard it was huge, meaning lots of pages/sites/et cetera indexed or spidered or whatever they do to access them.

I have not used Exalead much. That may change. Just a few seconds ago I typed in my standard test phrase. I figure if they can find that obscure website that I know exists (because I can go to it by typing in the URL), then they pass the acid test.

Sorry Google. You couldn't find the exact phrase even in the top 25 results. Exalead found my test site as result number three. A really good search engine should find that obscure site as result number one. But after testing a lot of search engines, Exalead rates highest. Congratulations, Exalead --

http://www.exalead.com/search/web/

Postscript -- It should be exalead dot com not with that suffix, Microsoft Search and a few other major search engines used to do that nonsense. That's why MSN Search is now Bing.
Google people, gotta give them credit though. I typed in "wwwgoogle.com" and other bad spellings without a dot or spliced in the wrong place and Google still came up.

Surfwax

Surfwax features wiki search, news search (unimpressive), RSS feed search, and a blog search where you have to log in. You can sort alphabetically, by relevance, and by source.

I always laugh (not necessarily out loud or NNOL) at "relevance" wordage at search sites. If it isn't what I want it is all irrelevant. The various search engines and the people who write their algorithms are doing the best they can . . . well actually they aren't. Somebody like me who knows exactly what they want down to the punctuation is frustrated by so-called exact phrase searches. They toss out articles like "the" or "an" which may be essential to the phrase. Exact string search is what I want because I know what I want. Apparently no one else does because search engines get away with second guessing you. The internet used to have search engines that did exact string but enough ranting [somebody give me a couple of million and I'll code the next big search engine]. Needless to say, Surfwax does not have exact phrase or if they did I couldn't find it and it should be easy to find if you have it in an advanced search. Surfwax has something called Focus, meaning their focus words. Overused and most annoying word: "Whatever!"

Surfwax --
http://www.surfwax.com/

Releton

The "rele" refers to your relatives and the "ton" refers to the electronic nature of this derivative search engine.

Releton
http://www.releton.com/

Qwerky

No, I', not on a Q kick. I was working off an alphabetical list for about one day.

What are the quirks of Qwerky? Does it use a QWERTY keyboard?

Quirks:

• Notebook of the Weirdest New Web 2.0 Names!
• Would You Give Your First Born To Name Websites Like These?
• funny one
• 10 Worst Web App Names

Yes it uses a standard keyboard.

Qwerky --

http://qwerky.stellify.net/

Quintura

Quintura bills itself as a visual search engine. It's okay. I rate newbie Bing higher on visual search. For you parents, they have Quintura for kids.
Quintura
http://www.quintura.com/


The people behind this started with a different URL --
http://qube.qelix.com/

If you are a geek into browserless search and social networking, then you may want to download this and become a beta tester.

If you are from the Q Continuum, then all this will seem primitive and quaint.