Search Engines For the Invisible Web - Metasearch Engines
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Metasearch engines are becoming popular again because they deliver information from several search engines, thus making it less likely that a valuable result will be omitted. There are many more search engines with metasearch capabilities in addition to ones already mentioned. Of these, ProFusion (http://www.invisibleweb.com or http://www.profusion.com), as already discussed, is specifically aimed at searching the Invisible Web. Other popular metasearch engines are old acquaintances such as Metacrawler (http://www.metacrawler.com), Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com), Copernic (http://www.copernic.com) and SurfWax (http://www.surfwax.com). These can be very helpful, though they do not specifically target the Invisible Web.
Topical Search Engines There are so many topical engines that you will almost certainly be able to find one or more for the topics of interest to you. However, not all topical search engines are equal. Some are better than the others, because they provide more links and their information is fresher. So, if you encounter a topical search engine that lists sites last updated in 2000 or earlier, do not give up; not all topical search engines for the Invisible Web are that bad!
I am not going to make a long list of topical search engines; it is impossible, and such lists change very frequently. Besides, there are sites and search engines that offer lists of topical search engines, which you can see for yourself. Instead, I will suggest to you a couple of resources that might not be included in such a list, but in my humble opinion are worth seeing.
One of the resources I think is worth seeing is http://news.google.com/. It is valuable because generally, news stories are not indexed by major search engines. Since news gets old quickly (and would already be history by the time a search engine spider indexes it, possibly several months later), it is unlikely that a searcher using the major search engines will be able to find up-to-date news. Also, news is unlikely to be found in search directories. It is true that news is interesting the moment it is happening, but old news can have a second life as a reference source.
Another useful resource is http://www.podscope.com/. This is a search engine for podcasts. Although it is still not very popular, it contains a lot of links. I guess that with the growing popularity of podcasting, this search engine will be a hot topic soon. One of its extras is that, for each retrieved item there is a Play button (link to the site, XML feed option, and so on) that allows users to hear the podcast without leaving the site.
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