So who's who in the search engine world? Mention the phrase 'search engine', and for many, 'Google' is the name that automatically comes to mind. In the minds of many, Google stands alone at the top of the pile of engines, as it almost always seems to be able to magically find exactly what you're looking for within the first ten or twenty listings. Significantly too, it's the Google search engine technology that powers the web search functionality of some of the largest web portals including Yahoo.com, Netscape.com, AOL.com and Earthlink.net. A recent press release from Google stated that its database now numbers a mind-boggling 3 billion web pages.

Though the average surfer has probably never heard the name before, 'Inktomi' is another of the major players in the search engine world. Unlike Google and most of the other search engines, Inktomi does not offer its own search site. There is no "Inktomi.com". Instead, Inktomi is the database engine that powers the search results at many partner sites and popular portals including MSN.com, Looksmart.com, Amazon.com and Hotbot.com.

Some have touted FAST (Alltheweb.com) as the search engine to dethrone Google, the current popularity champ. FAST has a database of over 2 billion web pages but what makes the search engine special is that it re-indexes and updates its database almost every two weeks - compared to Google which does so on average every month (or daily for a few popular pages). Importantly as well, FAST is the database engine that powers the search results at several large search portals including Lycos.com.

A relatively new search engine, Teoma, powers the results at the popular search portal AskJeeves.com. Since it first appeared sometime in 2000, Teoma has received some praise because of the high quality and relevance of its results. Teoma's major drawback, however, has been the size of its database which has always been relatively small, and which is currently estimated at approximately 400 million web pages.

Overture is a pure pay-per-click search engine. While the other engines discussed above will list the results of a particular search based on perceived relevance and their own ranking algorithms, the results of searches at Overture.com are ranked by order of "who's paid what". Individuals and companies bid on particular words and the search results are ordered from highest to lowest bidder.

While not a complete and comprehensive list, the five engines listed above have been singled out simply because they are well-known and well-used.

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