Over the past decade since Online was launched, it's the web that has made the difference. It has made it easier to access all the net's facilities, and encouraged a huge explosion in the number and diversity of websites.

With the web still expanding, we have taken the opportunity to ask Online's readers, contributors, and some of the Guardian's journalists to suggest the 100 most useful sites.

It is a sign of the vast reach of the web that it was constricting to have to limit coverage to 20 categories with only five sites in each - a lot of great sites have not made the cut.

The Guardian has its own website which now has more than 9m unique users and delivers more than 100m page impressions a month.We have listed the most popular Guardian sites, and some Online readers' suggestions.

Today, almost half (49%) of British people now have internet access from home. With more and more information coming online, the benefits of being connected can only increase, and in the next decade, few lives will remain untouched by the web.

Activism

Using the web to motivate and encourage action is no longer just a pipe dream. While America's MoveOn.org is probably the most successful example of web activism, some useful ideas are coming from British hacktivists. FaxYourMP takes the hassle out of contacting technophobic political representatives. Netaction is a rich resource for wannabe online campaigners, including The Virtual Activist, a superb manual for anyone looking to build and promote their cause online. Those interested in helping out in their local area might try Timebank, which finds organisations to which to donate spare time. AllAboutGiving tells you about charitable donations. Greenpeace has one of the most comprehensive cyberactivist sites.

http://www.faxyourmp.com/

http://www.netaction.org/

http://www.timebank.org.uk/

http://www.allaboutgiving.org/

http://act.greenpeace.org/

Art

The Internet Movie Database is the sine qua non for anyone interested in film. Easily searchable and full of information about any movie, plot, director, actor or crew member you could think of; reliably accurate. For opera lovers, Opera Base is essential. Check future schedules of singers or directors and find details of opera houses or festivals. The National Gallery's website is wonderful: you can search the entire collection with ease. Abe Books is the best and biggest place to look for and buy secondhand and rare books. All Music is a comprehensive database on all musical genres. Great for checking discographies and the like.

http://us.imdb.com/

http://www.operabase.com/

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/

http://www.abebooks.co.uk/

http://www.allmusic.com/

Blogs

Typepad has unseated Blogger.com as our favourite personal publishing tool. Like Blogger, it will also host your site - although you have to pay - but it will let you transfer your own domain name over too. A high level of control over content and layout, plus decent default templates top it off. Statcounter shows who's visiting your site, and helps you understand why they're there. Technorati lets you see who's linking to you. Blogdex shows what the blog community is obsessing about. Once you've mastered writing a blog, start the radio version with iPodder.org.

http://www.typepad.com/

http://www.statcounter.com/

http://www.technorati.com/

http://blogdex.net/

http://www.ipodder.org/

Buying and selling

The theory used to be that the net let you spend less time shopping, freeing you up for more interesting stuff. Now it's become clear that the net has drawn many into the shopping experience more deeply. The old cliche about Britain being a nation of shopkeepers has been given a new twist at eBay and Amazon, where thousands run their own virtual market stalls. EBay remains the most amusing place to browse. The small sellers in Amazon's Marketplace are great for tracking down deleted/out of print items. The shopping search site Kelkoo allows you to research products, compare prices and find out if the stores are signed up with the Isis (Internet Shopping is Safe) trust mark scheme. The Apple iTunes Music Store could do with some tweaking pricewise, but it still looks like the future of music retail. For offbeat gifts and early adopter gizmos try Josh Rubin's Cool Hunting blog.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/

http://www.amazon.co.uk/

http://www.kelkoo.co.uk/

www.apple.com/uk/itunes/store

www.joshrubin.com/coolhunting/

Community

You should be able to find a community for any interest, however niche, on the web - but for geek news, the best port of call is Slashdot. Orkut, a site that lets you communicate with friends of friends has replaced Friendster as the peer network du jour, but those wanting to focus on their local area might visit Craigslist, an eBay-meets-Loot which now has sites for London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Dublin. Del.icio.us is a bookmark manager that lets you store and organise your web favourites and then share the sites you browse with others, while Flickr is an online photo gallery that lets other people look at (and comment on) your pictures.

http://www.slashdot.org/

http://www.orkut.com/

http://craigslist.org/

http://del.icio.us/

http://www.flickr.com/

Education

UK learners can access a vast amount of superb web-based curriculum material; the best content, though, is only available on subscription. Free stuff tends to be thinner, but here are a few openly available sites worth a dip. Skoool.com is Irish, exported here by Intel; it covers a lot of ground (though has big holes), and will prove handy for pupils studying/revising at home. Nrich has a wealth of intriguing maths activities which extend and enliven the subject. National Archives (the government agency) has put together the huge and cleverly-presented Learning curve. The best new site, though shallow in content as yet, is the National Theatre's Stagework site: nice video clips to support drama. And the prize for neatest, simplest idea has to go to britkid.org, a resource for opening children's eyes to the diversity of our culture.

http://www.skoool.com/

http://www.nrich.maths.org.uk/

http://www.stagework.org.uk/

http://www.learningcurve.gov.uk/

http://www.britkid.org/

Email

Hotmail is the free email service everyone knows. It's also dangerous, because Microsoft will delete all your messages if you don't log on every 30 days. However, it's an obvious choice for people who use Microsoft Messenger, MSN Spaces (Microsoft's new blogging service), and Internet Explorer, because they all work together. But if you just want web-based email, go for Yahoo. It is cleaner and faster, and you can forward email to a phone or pager. Yahoo only provides 100 megabytes of free space, whereas Hotmail provides 250MB, and Google's Gmail a gigabyte (1GB). One drawback with Gmail is that you cannot sign up: you have to be invited. My first choice is Bluebottle. It's free, it offers 250MB of storage, and as well as web access, it supports POP3 and Imap, so you can use a proper email program from copy.

http://www.bluebottle.com/

http://mail.yahoo.com/

http://gmail.google.com/

http://www.hotmail.com/

http://www.walla.com/

Gaming

For features and information about all past, current and future platforms and products, IGN is a good first stop, although the north American slant may put off the casual observer. UK gamers who want home-grown opinion should head to SPOnG. It has a great reputation among professionals and consumers for reviews, rumours and news. Slashdot Games is a good source for what's floating around the web. If you're stumped by a difficult puzzle, GameFAQs lists game player-created walkthroughs, plus links to cheats, reviews and previews. Finally, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board has a searchable list of games by age rating. It's a useful source for parents considering whether the content of a game is appropriate for their child.

http://ign.com/

http://www.spong.com/

http://games.slashdot.org/

http://gamefaqs.com/

www.esrb.com/esrbratings.asp

Health

There are more websites devoted to health than to almost any other subject, but some are more reliable than others. A slightly sceptical approach is probably healthiest, but the website of the National Electronic Library for Health brings together all the latest research evidence, safety and organisational concerns. There is even a "hitting the headlines" feature, where staff at the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination at York University assess the reliability of health correspondents' reporting! The Health Protection Agency (formerly Public Health Laboratory Service) has masses of information, including all the symptoms, facts and figures you could ever want on infectious diseases, while the Food Standards Agency is commendably rapid at publishing agendas and minutes of scientific advisory committees, as well as food safety alerts. The British Medical Journal has been unusual among medical journals in allowing free access to all articles past and present, though some limited restrictions are coming inforce from January. Avert is the website of an international Aids charity which has brilliant statistical data and explanations of the science that anyone can understand.

http://www.nelh.nhs.uk/

http://www.hpa.org.uk/

http://www.food.gov.uk/

http://www.bmj.com/

http://www.avert.org/

News

The BBC's strengths lie in its breadth of content. A mix of audio, video and text blurs the boundary between old and new media, while the low graphics version even works well on GPRS mobile phones. The New York Times has a huge site, and Google's news website gives old media editors sleepless nights. Headlines are scraped from around the world, with Google's computers deciding on the placement of stories. That means eccentric news selection, but lots of choice. Bomb in Baghdad? Look at coverage from Al-Jazeera to ABC, via Swissinfo and Australia's news.com.au. Ohmynews is a popular South Korean site that relies on 33,000 "citizen reporters". What they write is edited and fact-checked by professional journalists making the site an interesting hybrid between weblog and pro news site. Finally, the Scotsman's site continues to punch above its weight. Its latest addition is a premium archive search stretching back to 1817.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/

http://nytimes.com/

http://news.google.co.uk/

http://ohmynews.com/

http://scotsman.com/

Offbeat

Easily Amused is a guide to fun sites albeit a shadow of its predecessor, the Center for Easily Amused. The Weird Site is another source, but less family-friendly. Still, there's a nice web ring with links to 106 Unusual Museums of the Internet, including the Virtual Toilet Paper Museum, Kilokat's Antique Light Bulb Site, and the Burlingame Museum of Pez Memorabilia; another 106 sites are awaiting approval. For an amusing and educational browse, it's hard to beat Snopes, the Urban Legends Reference Pages. The site analyses and debunks all those false claims and hoaxes circulating on the net and elsewhere. Otherwise, for today's five minutes of fun, try browsing B3ta. This UK site sends out a weekly newsletter of cool links and runs a message board where people post amusingly manipulated pictures, some rated NSFW (Not Safe For Work).

http://www.snopes.com/

www.theweirdsite.com/Otherlinks.htm

http://www.b3ta.com/

www.ringsurf.com/netring?ring=museum;action=list

http://www.easilyamused.com/

Phones

Mobileburn is an excellent news and reviews site focusing on new and high-end devices. GSM Arena is a comprehensive site on GSM handsets, where review scores are compiled from reader votes. Yahoo has a straightforward Wap search engine, which also provides a quick menu of selected games, logos, wallpapers, news and finance sites. WGamer is the site for the latest mobile games. It's US-based but the reviews are more in-depth than any on the web. Japan produces some of the most advanced mobile phones, so if you want to know the features that will be available in Europe a year from now, Mobile Media Japan is the place. Finally, the cellphone section of gadget blog Engadget has news and pithy comment on the latest handsets.

http://www.mobileburn.com/

www.gsmarena.com/

http://wgamer.com/

wap.yahoo.co.uk

http://cellphones.engadget.com/

Politics

Tony Blair's official website is a good place to start if you want to find out what the government is up to. TheyWorkForYou lets you search Hansard by MP and issue. For predictions, forget the official opinion poll sites, City forecaster Martin Baxter's is the best. Electoral Calculus illustrates what the polls mean, and to see what the blogs are saying, look at UK Poli Blogs. If you want to become active, the Google directory has the best list of campaigns, parties and pressure groups.

www.number-10.gov.uk/

www.theyworkforyou.com/

http://electoralcalculus.co.uk/

www.voidstar.com/ukpoliblog/

http://directory.google.co.uk/

Public services

Directgov is the best place to start looking for information if you don't know which organisation it comes from; which, for normal people, is most of the time. The NHS Gateway is a breakthrough in navigating the health service, and carries information on waiting times by speciality and postcode. You can report crime online at police.uk, or at least that's the theory. At the National Archives you can read the Magna Carta or find out what granddad did in the war. The parliament website is stodgy, but contains lots of information - and finally, the Inland Revenue. No, really: the tax collector is getting the hang of this web thingy.

http://www.direct.gov.uk/

http://www.nhs.uk/

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/

http://www.inlandrevenue.gov.uk/

http://www.parliament.uk/

Radio

Streaming radio is one of the fastest-growing areas of the web. The BBC outdoes its rivals by providing 11 stations to suit all tastes. The corporation's Radio Player gadget also allows you to listen to anything broadcast over the past week. If you're looking for new stations, you could drop by Radio-Locator or look at Live-Radio.net, which lists thousands of broadcasters around the globe. Last.fm drops tailor-made radio into your lap, and Traffic Island Disks is a downloadable radio programme which is both engaging and surprising.

www.bbc.co.uk/radio

http://radio-locator.com/

www.live-radio.net/

http://www.last.fm/

www.traffic-island.co.uk/

Reference

The web is often the quickest place to look something up - if you know where to go. If you don't, you can always start with Jim Martindale's Reference Desk, an astonishing collection that has been 10 years in the making. Usually, however, you will probably want to look up a word, a phone number, a place or whatever. For words, try Onelook, which indexes more than 6m words in 981 dictionaries. It also has a "reverse lookup" to find words from their meanings. For longer items, the Concise Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia is online (the Britannica costs money). There are links to the world's online phone books at Teldir, which is now on the Infobel site. Finally, there are maps of just about everywhere at Multimaps.

http://www.martindalecenter.com/

http://www.onelook.com/

http://www.multimaps.com/

www.infobel.com/teldir

http://www.encyclopedia.com/

Science

Yahoo can be worth checking two or three times a day. Eurkalert was deliberately created by the American Association for the Advancement of Science as a forum for formal science press announcements, and that, too, merits a daily visit: over the years, it has become a research resource in itself. Space.com is an impressive, eclectic place. But the best for almost a decade has been, and is still, Nasa.gov. There's plenty of government, but also a wealth of delicious arcana, including the Lunar Surface Journal, a transcript of all the conversations on the moon, annotated by the Apollo astronauts themselves.

http://dir.yahoo.com/Science/news_and_media/

www.eurekalert.org/

http://space.com/

www.palaeos.com/Timescale/

www.nasa.gov/home/

Search

Search is still the jewel of the web: the ability to extract information on any subject in a fraction of a second. Search engines can now scour hard disks, news groups, images, blogs, emails and peer-to-peer sites as well as the web. Some can do nearly all of these simultaneously. Google remains king of the jungle but Yahoo - which now owns Overture, AllTheWeb and AltaVista (number one choice in the pre-Google era) - is snapping at its heels, leaving MSN Search a distant third. One of the most interesting new sites - though the consumer experience doesn't yet live up to the hype - is Blinkx. It claims to search more sources simultaneously (including hard disks, video and peer-to-peer) than anyone else, using artificial intelligence to interpret the context of what you are saying rather than Google's page rankings (PCs only until January).

http://www.google.co.uk/

http://search.yahoo.com/

http://beta.search.msn.co.uk/

http://www.blinkx.com/

http://www.searchenginewatch.com/

Sport

Do you urgently need to know who's leading the Slovenian Liga? The latest results from Bulgaria? Soccerbot has more football stats than you can shake a geek at. Meanwhile, Cricinfo, the online branch of the cricketing authority Wisden, covers most aspects of the world game, and it has a searchable facts and figures database to die for. Howzat? If you want to wager online, Blue Square is your best bet, while One Mick Jones is best read if you (a) like Leeds United, (b) always wear a leather jacket bought before 1978, or (c) think Popbitch is like, so passé. At the First Church of Tiger Woods, however, "pastor" John Ziegler wonders whether Tiger Woods is God. Well, clearly not - but suspend your golfing agnosticism awhile and marvel at evidence of his divinity, the Ten Tiger Commandments, Tiger news and a kitsch screensaver. Just don't call him Eldrick.

http://www.soccerbot.com/

http://www.cricinfo.com/

http://www.bluesq.com/

http://www.onemickjones.com/

http://www.tigerwoodsisgod.com/

Travel

Travel Jungle does an excellent job of tracking fares by searching 23 airlines and nine travel agents simultaneously and also has a decent hotel search. If the capital's transport network were half as efficient as Transport for London's journey planner, black cabs would be out of business. It serves disabled passengers and brisk walkers equally well. Let's hope that the national public transport portal Transportdirect.info will catch up when it gets round to integrating cycling routes. In the meantime, a small team at Xephos are doing it a lot better. The downside is that they start charging once the free allocation of seven days' use or 100 hits is used up. Michelin's database, on the other hand, is still free and its maps of Europe and hotel and restaurant recommendations are unmatched on the web. Bringing up the rear is Seat61, a labour of love devoted to European rail travel.

http://www.traveljungle.co.uk/

http://www.viamichelin.com/

http://journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk/

http://www.internet.xephos.com/

http://www.seat61.com/

· Contributions from Sarah Boseley, Michael Cross, Tom Happold, Charlotte Higgins, Colin Hughes, Bobbie Johnson, Dan Jones, Victor Keegan, Aleks Krotoski, Neil McIntosh, Jim McClellan, James Meikle, Tim Radford, Keith Stuart, Jack Schofield and Ros Taylor

100 most useful websites — Guardian websites

News and Politics Twenty-four hour news and political coverage.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/
blogs.guardian.co.uk/news

Sport Incisive, witty commentary and daily football email The Fiver .
http://football.guardian.co.uk/
http://sport.guardian.co.uk/

Arts Sites for the arts, film and books.
www.guardian.co.uk/arts
http://books.guardian.co.uk/
http://film.guardian.co.uk/
blogs.guardian.co.uk/theguide

Education Expert coverage of the sector plus Learn.co.uk is a resource of interactive e-learning materials aimed at school-age students and teachers.
http://education.guardian.co.uk/
http://www.learn.co.uk/

Media Dissecting the media - from TV and radio to advertising and the internet.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/

Public Services News and comment
http://society.guardian.co.uk

Online
www.guardian.co.uk/online
blogs.guardian.co.uk/online
blogs.guardian.co.uk/games

Readers' favourites

http://www.wikipedia.org/
"I needed information on Hallowe'en for one of my classes. I first went to Encarta - they had no information at all. I then went to Wikipedia: everything from food that is eaten to a detailed historical background."

http://www.cursor.org/
"Political commentary monitoring US politics and foreign affairs with consistent and civilised viewpoint."

http://www.limmy.com/
"Anyone from Glasgow, or with an understanding of the Glasgow sense of humour and ned culture etc should definitely check it out."

http://www.yell.com/
"Very simple, fast and efficient. Never fails to deliver phone number and address, as long as you know the name and town."

http://www.musicplasma.com/
"Type in the name of a band you like and it creates an inter-connected universe of other acts you might also enjoy."

remogeneralstore.com
"It's very slick - well designed, extremely stylish and really creates a sense of a community and loyalty."

http://www.moimoimoi.co.uk/
"They do a great little range of toys that are not the usual fare."

www.wearewhatwedo.org/default.aspx
"A great site with really useful links and something for all the family to get involved in."

http://www.thedvdforums.co.uk/
"Registration needed, but for anything film related (DVD, TV or cinema) including technology, it is excellent. Also thousands of bargains from big and little retailers - this site is pretty much the best of the web."

Google, founded in 1998 by two Stanford University graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, quickly became the web's leading search engine because it was easy to use and delivered high-quality results.

Rather than relying on users to frame intelligent searches to find what they want, Google's page-rank system massages the results to push the best sites to the top. Quality is decided by the number of other good sites that link to the same content.

Now Google also provides other options on its front page to search for images, news stories, Usenet postings (under Groups), shopping sites (under Froogle) and, in the US, for local companies. PC users can also install a toolbar that adds Google to their browser, and download desktop search software that enables Google to search their hard drive.

There are further options, not on the front page, to search mail order catalogues, and computer-related topics (Apple Macintosh, BSD Unix, Linux, Microsoft), US universities and scholarly publications.

Google is now expanding beyond search and also offers email (Gmail), a blogging service (Blogger), social networking (Orkut), and photo album software (Picasa). Most are useful, but in general, are not integrated to work together.

Yahoo

Yahoo started 11 years ago as a simple directory of websites compiled by two Stanford University graduate students, David Filo and Jerry Yang. It soon became the most prominent site on the web, and expanded rapidly into a portal.

It now offers email, instant messaging, a groups system (not related to Usenet), auctions, games, online stores, photo albums, home pages on the web (through GeoCities), and too many other features to mention. Many of these have become increasingly hard to find. The hierarchical directory that used to make up the front page has disappeared, and been replaced by a Google-like search box.

Yahoo's options are: Web, Images, Video, Directory, Local, News, and Products. Yahoo used to get its web search results from Google but it has taken over a number of search engines, including AltaVista, and now supplies its own.

If you run a web search on Yahoo, the results look almost identical to Google, and many of the top sites are the same. Yahoo's advantage, as a portal, is that millions of users go there for reasons that have nothing to do with search, but if they need to look something up, they may as well use Yahoo rather than go to Google.

MSN Search

MSN, the Microsoft Network, was launched in 1995 as a rival to AOL. It added Hotmail, instant messaging, shopping and other services as it grew into a portal, and in July 2000, it became the leading web destination, with more than 200m visitors a month. Two years ago, Microsoft decided that MSN's search should be powered by Microsoft technology, and this was finally released in 21 countries in 10 languages on February 1.

Microsoft's offerings are: Web, News, Images, Desktop, and Encarta. It also has a Near Me button for local searches. The results pages look like Google's but adverts are more prominent. As with Google and Yahoo, the toolbar and desktop search software must be downloaded separately.

Unadjusted searches at MSN are rarely better than Google and sometimes much worse. Most of its usage is therefore most likely to come from people who are on the MSN site for other reasons, or are searching from Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, where it is the default.

MSN Search does have a drop-down tool, Search Builder, which includes sliders that let you adjust the settings for sites that are more popular or have been updated recently. However, these are so cumbersome to use, it seems few will bother.

Golden oldies

Ask Jeeves (http://www.ask.com/) is one of the biggest engines outside the top table, and claims to be most people's "second favourite engine". The original concept of using natural language ("where can I find bike shops in Glasgow?") still holds true, although it also caters for keyword searching. The hard work is done by the Teoma engine (http://www.teoma.com/), which Jeeves acquired in 2000. Both give clean results, including image and related search options, and Jeeves also offers MyJeeves, which remembers your searches and lets you save important ones.

Other long-standing search names are still going, though most have been bought out by larger rivals or exist in radically different forms. Pioneer AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com/) was bought out by a series of small firms until it was hoovered up by Yahoo, and it now uses Yahoo results, though it still boasts one of the web's best translators, BabelFish (babelfish.altavista.com). Other engines including Inktomi have also been consumed by the Yahoo brand.

One of the web's earliest search successes, Lycos (http://www.lycos.com/), is still around, though it, too, has changed hands many times. It now works in tandem with Hotbot (http://www.hotbot.com/), a metasearch site that pulls results from across several engines to produce aggregated - and theoretically better - results.

Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com/) is probably the best-known metasearch engine, and draws results from Jeeves, Google, Yahoo and others. It pulls answers from these and removes duplicates, but sometimes misses some of the more idiosyncratic results. It also searches across images, audio, video and news. If you find the results aren't quite your cup of tea, you could turn to MetaCrawler (http://www.metacrawler.com/), which is also owned by Dogpile's parent company, Infospace. Metacrawler was launched in 1994, so it has a long track record, and it produces filtered results from a familiar range of sources.

Clustering

Several of the lower league search engines use a technique known as clustering to help users filter out the best results. This intelligently divides a morass of answers into categories, to help users weed out unwanted pages - particularly useful if you get thousands of results on your keywords.

Clusty (http://www.clusty.com/) is still in beta-testing mode, but combines Google-like search functions with clustering options. A search for "Guardian Online", for example, pro duced clusters including newspapers, politics, journalism, entertainment, books and angels. You can build categories based on either topic, source or URL, and the news and image searches seem fairly accurate, even if they sometimes return fewer results than you might need.

Australian-based Mooter (http://www.mooter.com/) has a more visual approach, presenting clusters as a spider diagram, and shows a more traditional list when you click on your chosen category - but by the time you get to the results, they seem much the same as other engines.

Kartoo http://www.kartoo.com/) takes the visual option further by drawing Flash "maps" of search results. While visually interesting, it can be cumbersome and seems to throw up a lot of commercial results.

Regular and real time

Other sites have chosen different ways to change Google's search paradigm. Some have opted for more regular - or even real-time - searching, taking results from the web as they happen rather than relying on an irregularly updated library of results.

Daypop (http://www.daypop.com/) trawls news sites and weblogs at least once a day, producing good results, while Technorati.com (http://www.technorati.com/) applies itself purely to weblogs but picks up new pages within minutes of them being published. The basic search is adequate, though it sometimes suffers from time outs. The recently launched "tags" function incorporates blog categories, social bookmarking site del.icio.us and photo-sharing service Flickr to create ad-hoc keyword homepages.

Local searches

Some search firms focus on geographical niches, favouring local results to offer what could be more appropriate answers. Several target the British market, including UKWizz (http://www.ukwizz.com/), which looks quite basic and struggles to compete with Google's local search (http://www.google.co.uk/).

Newsnow (http://www.newsnow.co.uk/), a British-based news searcher, sifts through headlines on news stories and categorises them by age. It is very good for basic searches ("Beckham", for example) but you have to pay to search for multiword phrases or inside the full text of an article.

Exalead, which is still in beta, ( http://beta.exalead.com/ ) is a well-designed attempt to provide as many search options as possible, including geographically based ones. It also includes audio and video searching, limited clustering and the ability to search for different document types - all without cluttering the interface.

Honourable mentions

Blinkx (http://www.blinkx.com/) drops keyword search in favour of clever artifical intelligence to find what you're looking for. The interface is clunky, but it draws results from the web, your desktop and other sources.

Icerocket (www.icerocket.com) is quite similar to the big engines, but provides a screenshot of the page the result comes from, and searches both blogs and photographs within blogs - though that seems limited.

Singing Fish (http://www.singingfish.com/) focuses on audio and video search. It is not perfect and is unlikely to give you huge numbers of results (just 10 for "Eminem Mosh", for example) but it is customisable and has a parental filter.

Websbiggest (http://www.websbiggest.com/) ranks pages by the amount of traffic they get, while Looksmart (http://www.looksmart.com/), a survivor of the early days, focuses on being a portal, offering little to the search melee.

Amazon-owned A9 (http://www.a9.com/) organises and recalls searches easily (handy if you can't remember how you found that website last Saturday), but the basic results are provided by Google. It links up with Amazon.com and the Internet Movie Database, making it useful for searching across books and movies.

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