by: Dean Phillips
In keeping with a promise I made to my readers, here's another great alternative to Google and Yahoo!: Say hello to Mamma.com!
Mamma.com is a metasearch search engine. A metasearch search engine actually compiles search results from a variety of sources. When you enter a query at Mamma.com, you actually submit your query to the top search engines on the Internet, and then merge the results eliminating any duplicates.
It searches Google, Business.com, Findwhat, About, LookSmart, MSN, Open Directory, plus other leading search engines.
Mamma.com has a great power search page where users can choose the sources that they query. Since Mamma organizes between index, directory and pay-per-click, users can tailor the search engines to match the type of information they require.
Mamma also have a great tool in its services and tools section that is called the Mamma explorer barclick now, surf later. This lets users (who have downloaded the product) drag and drop search results into a window and save their search results for later viewing (or even just to make sure they don't lose track of the result). If you have ever done a search and come away with 10 open windows, you can easily imagine how useful this tool is for research.
Mamma has a great ranking algorithmapplied to all pages returned. This gives back results that are both commercial in content and resourceful in terms of educating the user. Mamma also applies attribution to the search resultsby defaultsorting by relevancenot by source. On some other metasearch search engines, you have to go to the second page and do an extra click to get your results sorted by relevance. This is not optimal, since not one index is superior to the other, and sorting by Google first, may not always give the users the best result first.
In addition, Mamma.com supports white and yellow page look- ups, and has a great picture search functionality.
Here's an interesting note: According to Mamma.com, Mark Cuban, star of the reality television show, "The Benefactor," and owner of the Dallas Mavericks) invested in Mamma.com in March, because he liked the picture search functionality so much.