This can increase the usefulness of search sites, but also create confusion in terms of the information source. The mechanism for searching a spider-gathered index is the feature people usually associate with a search engine. Examples include Ask Jeeves , Direct Hit , RealNames and many others. Each partner service offers an enhancement over the more traditional term ranked results. This represents an interesting combination of first and second generation search technologies appearing on the same site.
Many search services offer a directory on their sites.
This directory may be a name brand such as LookSmart or the Open Directory Project, or a directory compiled by a site's own editors. Results from the directory may appear automatically with results from the spider-crawled Web, or the directory may be searched or browsed separately. Included may be news, business, shopping, multimedia files, and so on. These databases constitute a small subset of the deep Web. All of this points to a blurring of the distinctions among sites that provide directory content, those that offer results from the spider-crawled Web, and those that provide access to content on the deep Web.