Mamma.com: A Great Alternative To Google And Yahoo!

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 bar--click 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 algorithm--applied 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 results--by
default--sorting by relevance--not 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.