libraryland

Ixquick is a global metasearch engine out of the Netherlands that’s been around a while. It’s been enjoying a surge of popularity lately after the recent AOL search/privacy story broke, as Ixquick proudly states that the engine protects your privacy. I see a trend here… I have used the search a few times (but not extensively) with decent results. It doesn’t appear to return Google search results (but I could be wrong), but rather uses All the Web (which is essentially Yahoo) as it’s heavy-hitter. (Side note: I did a search in both All the Web and Yahoo - the results were identical.) Ixquick compares the retyrns from all of the search engines queried (up to 10 of them) and then ranks the results.

The Scroogle Scraper basically scrapes Google and presents the search results without ads, cookies, or other means of tracking / saving your search information.

There are links on the main Scroogle page that will take you to information about the idealogy of the site, traffic graphs, HTML for adding a search box to your own site, a Yahoo scraper, and etc. If you are concerned with how your search strategies are tracked, saved, and used by Google, this site offers an alternative. If those issues don’t concern you, it’s still interesting reading.

Wink is yet another tagging/searching/sorta-kinda bookmarking site. Personally, I find Wink more useful a search engine than some of the other tagging sites - which is good, as it bills itself as a “social search engine.” May not be for everyone, but few things are. Neat that you can rank results. You will find it listed on the Search Engines page.

Femina is a cross between a search engine and a directory - and it provides links to women and girl-friendly websites and resources. It’s been around since 1995 and has grown quite a bit. According to their “about” page, there will be a section of women’s personal homepages coming soon - cool!