Ways to find what you want Search services come in many forms, with distinctions that often blur. Portals are multifaceted sites that combine search capabilities with other categories such as shopping, weather, news, chat, and more. Some sites that began as plain search engines have evolved into full-service portals. Metasearch sites query several search engines simultaneously, then collect the results on one page. A directory is an index of the web that has been hand-compiled by human editors and organized into categories and subcategories.
Some directories are also portals.
Nearly every search service features Shopping as a category, with subcategories such as Autos and Electronics. You can then roam through links to get as specific as you like, working down to brand, model, and special features. Since search tools vary, however, a single one won't work for every product or information query. Also, search services have deals with different sites to drive traffic. So experiment to see which sites bring you the fastest, easiest results.