Google
At a time when many search engines are expanding into portals, Google still focuses solely on searching. Fast and with a refreshingly spare interface, Google consistently turns up high-quality, highly relevant results. Google does well on specific queries, such as World War II American casualties, and broad-topic searches, such as home buying. It's also great at targeting a specific home page, having the best accuracy rate in this roundup.
Google recently started incorporating useful extras into its Results page. Depending on your query, you may get stock quotes, or related news stories for example. We like Google's ability to view cached copies of results pages. When the page you want to access is no longer live, you can view a cached copy of the way it looked the last time Google crawled it.
Google offers only basic query customization features, including phrase searching and foreign-language filtering. You can use plus or minus signs to include or exclude keywords, or you can head to the Advanced Search page for drop-down pick lists to construct complex searches. Google doesn't support advanced features such as date filtering, wildcards, or proximity operators, yet the quality of the results match or exceed those of every other site tested.
Direct Link: Google
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