Ixquick

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Ixquick is a meta search engine that submits your search to fourteen of the major search engines and finds sites that are universally ranked in the top one hundred. The results are ranked by the number of engines they are listed on and ranked by a star system. Apparently one star for each site. These implies that these are the top web sites. Wrong! These are only the web sites that managed to get themselves high listings in search engines which is hardly and indication of the quality of the site. They show a list of search engines with a number in parenthesis for each result. Top-ten ranking appears in parentheses after the name of each search engine. They list only 10 results per page view which I find inefficient. I would like to see a select control that allows me to define the number of results I want on a page. Or they should display at least 20. A major drawback for me is that Ixquick will open a site in a separate window when you click on it. I hate that. I prefer that websites leave my desktop alone.

There are a few things I like about Ixquick. I like the number and the quality of the search engines used. I also like the fact that they consolidate the results which eliminates duplicates. Ixquick has a page of power search techniques that help you learn the syntax of their search language. I encourage you to look at these because they contain some powerful capabilities. In particular, I like the ability to search for words in a title, limit search to a domain or specific host or url, and to search for links or related pages. There is one big drawback here though. Ixquick does not report back the total number of pages found. For example, when you use Infoseek or Alta Vista to search for links to your website, it reports the total number of links. Very important information that Ixquick does not report. Ixquick has a domain name finder that will help you find an available domain name by mixing and matching words of your choice. This is a very useful feature and I wish I knew about it a few weeks ago when I was looking for a domain name.

(Last updated 10/11/02)