What do Wisenut, Dogpile, Gigablast, Snap, and Kartoo have in common? How about Singingfish, Grokker, and Shopzilla? (You might wonder if we’re blowing bubbles over here.) Along with Google and Yahoo—otherwise known as “big search”—these are names of some popular Internet search engines and directories, or “search sites.” Recent statistics by Jupiter Research show that 80% of Internet users use search sites to find products, services, information, and communities. In December 2005, a heavy shopping time, some 5 billion searches were logged worldwide. Along with the rise of new blog and audio/video podcast technologies, some experts credit the search industry with revitalizing the dot-com economy after the late-90s freefall.

Many Internet users use just one “big search” site for months or years—is this you? Well…are you bored yet? Then take this short tour of interesting search sites and expand your concept of what search can be. Search can be an adventure. Think of search as powerful binocular vision into the epic Internet universe. Think of owning a drawer full of cool new binoculars, each with special powers. Woo-hoo! Are you ready?

First, pick a search query of interest to use throughout the tour. Ours will be “dark chocolate.”

Let’s start with one that uses a dramatic, interactive map display of search results, www.kartoo.com.

Mouse over the map and amazing things happen! Give in to the urge to play with this lively, intuitive interface. In this example, the cursor hovered on the webmd.com Web page symbol (which pulsed), and a line zoomed to the topic word “health.” A preview of the home page, text fragments, and a URL flashed up in the left panel. Very fun! When the excitement wears off, note that some Web page symbols are larger or bundled. These indicate importance or relevance to your query. You can refine your search results by clicking on topic words that are surrounded by blue shapes in the map, or by clicking on a keyword that appears in the left panel when you mouse over a URL. Click on the “next map” banner to continue your search-results tour. As indicated in the blue text in the lower right-hand corner, 15 additional pages of search-result maps are in the queue, waiting for you to continue your search adventure.

Did you like seeing a “sneak preview” of the home page when you moused over the Web page icon? You can get a much bigger home page preview using our next search site: www.snap.com.

Not only do you get a large preview for each search result, you get it very quickly. Use your up and down arrows to select each result in turn, which causes each preview to appear on the screen. Some results are marked with “View 4 related results,” providing you with similar choices. This site is interactive too—you can directly interact with the Web site without leaving Snap. When you turn on “Click to open results inside Snap” in the Settings menu, the preview is replaced by the actual site after you click on the preview.

Snap has two zip-code “widget” tools: map and weather. Enter your zip code in the search field, and the site will return the correct interactive Google map. Enter your zip code and the word “weather” (without quotes) and the site will return a list of correct weather results. Select any result and click on the preview to go to the actual home page of your selected weather site.

Would you like to read more about interesting search sites? Look up articles on this site: www.findarticles.com.

This LookSmart search site gives you fast access to 10 million articles dating from 1984, including general interest, academic, industry, and government publications. Each article displays within the site instead of sending you out into the Internet. If you want to save articles for research or any other purposes, sign up for a free Looksmart “furl” account, which gives you a virtual place to store a personal archive of saved pages (not just links) from anywhere on the Internet. You can access these from any computer that has Internet access.

Check out these worthy search sites too:

• www.dogpile.com searches Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask all at one time—and how can you resist that cute dog?
• www.goodsearch.com uses Yahoo technology to power searches that donate a penny per search to your favorite charities
• www.wisenut.com groups searches into categories and provides for expanding searches; try the “sneak-a-peak” feature
• www.gigablast.com indexes search results on the fly, very efficiently; this search site claims to be the environmentally-friendly search solution, using less energy
• www.singingfish.com searches only for multimedia files for music, movies, sports, news, TV and radio, and finance
• www.shopzilla.com is an easy-to-use comparison shopping site that provides for customer feedback of retailers
• www.thomasnet.com is a comprehensive resource for finding information on suppliers of industrial products and services in North America
• http://catalog.loc.gov is the search page for the Library of Congress online catalog.

As you learn more about searching, you’ll find that search engines, directories, and access to special collections are different technologies, but for the purposes of this article, we’ve focused on the search-user needs and experience.

Happy searching!