Per trovare cioè che ci serve sono fondamentali i motori di ricerca, che si stanno evolvendo per adattarsi ai nuovi contenuti della Rete. I motori di ricerca specializzati, a patto che esistano sugli argomenti che ci interessano, offrono sicuramente risposte più precise e mirate (spesso assai più utili e meno dispersive) dei motori generali. I motori di ricerca specializzati, a patto che esistano sugli argomenti che ci interessano, offrono sicuramente risposte più precise e mirate (spesso assai più utili e meno dispersive) dei motori generali. Si può partire da un sito specializzato che elenca tutti (credo) i motori delle diverse nazioni o quelli dedicati ai vari settori: è Beaucoup!. Con gli stessi obiettivi ci si può riferire a Buscopio, lo spagnolo «buscador de buscadores». Oppure per indicazioni e link sui motori generali o specializzati sparsi per il mondo c'è un motore specializzato sui motori ed è in italiano...

OneRiot is a realtime web search engine. Users search with OneRiot to find the news, videos and blogs that are people are buzzing about right now on the social web. Uniquely, OneRiot delivers search results as they emerge, ordered to reflect current social relevance. OneRiot is a privately held company headquartered in Boulder, Colorado with offices in San Francisco. Instead of crawling and indexing the entire Internet Google-style, OneRiot indexes web pages that are shared on Twitter and Digg, and uses the number of shares of a URL to determine how high it will rank in the search results. As a news article, blog post, or video gets passed around, it gains search relevance. OneRiot’s relevance algorithm has 26 parameters by which it determines a link’s importance. Most important is the sheer number of links to a URL, and the “velocity” — how fast the number of links to a URL has climbed within the past two minutes.This is all done in realtime. Content is indexed within 35 seconds. OneRiot has an API and partnership program for adding realtime search capabilities to browser add-ons, desktop applications, social websites and other services.

The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike Web directories, which are maintained by human editors, search engines operate algorithmically or are a mixture of algorithmic and human input. Before there were web search engines there was a complete list of all webservers. The list was edited by Tim Berners-Lee and hosted on the CERN webserver. One historical snapshot from 1992 remains. As more and more webservers went online the central list could not keep up. On the NCSA site new servers were announced under the title "What's New!" but no complete listing existed any more. The very first tool used for searching on the (pre-web) Internet was Archie. The name stands for "archive" without the "v." It was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal. The program downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, creating a searchable database of file names; however, Archie did not index the contents of these sites.