Indiatimes search

Information rules! The two words sum up the present day scenario. However, to get correct, timely, and exhaustive information is not all that easy. To an extent, search engines work as an effective tool to address info-related blues. And the Indian search engines further help you to look for indigenized content on the Web.

This year we conferred on Indiatimes Search our Editor’s Choice. This search engine powered by Google, has become popular on its support for simple language queries, a vast database and a modest and intuitive user interface. Indiatimes has divided search into ‘The Web’, ‘India-directory’, ‘Indiatimes Channels’ and ‘News’. For simple queries, just type in a few descriptive words in the search box and get results. In advanced search, Indiatimes provides you with more specific categories and sub-sections like ‘Business on the Web’ and ‘Travel on the Web’. Advanced search also divides India-directory into categories like Art and Culture, Business and Economy, Entertainment and more. These categories are further sub-divided into separate sections. Indiatimes further simplifies search by giving a list of 101 most useful sites under different categories. In order to keep itself and its readers updated, Indiatimes appoints Web guides to hunt for the best sites. These guides then disseminate info to readers and work as volunteer editors to help Indiatimes create a Web Directory. However, Indiatimes does not support ‘or’ operator and wildcard entries.

Rediff Search

At par with Indiatimes in most features was our First runner-up, Rediff search. It combines handpicked sites from its own directory and over 100 million documents from Inktomi into a comprehensive database and offers both simple and advanced searches. On receiving a query, Rediff puts it through its own directory and displays results as the "Editor’s Choice". For more results, the query is passed to the Inktomi search engine. Further, you can limit search by using tools like Specified Keywords, Date, Location and Media type. Moreover, advanced features allow users to choose the kind of search to execute and even to customize the results displayed.

Yahoo!India

Recently launched Indian arm of Yahoo! just made it as our Second runner-up. Yahoo! India lets you search using specified keyword(s). After you submit a query, Yahoo will search through the five areas of its database i.e. Yahoo! Categories, Web Sites, Web Pages, News Stories and Yahoo! Net Events. The first page returned to you will be a list of matching Yahoo categories followed by a list of Yahoo Sites. If no matching items are found, it automatically performs a Web-wide, full-text document search using the Google search engine.