If it seems as if the Web is turning into one uninterrupted strip mall of commercial clutter, perhaps you need to consider a more focused approach to searching non-profit sources.
MaxBot.com, a start-up in Kirkland, Wash., has three new and very powerful specialized search engines for serious information-mining: www.searchgov.com for U.S. government sites, www.searchedu.com for universities and other educational sites, and www.searchmil.com for sites within the Pentagon’s dot-mil top-level domain.
In a half-dozen test queries I ran this past week, the company’s popularity ranking technology did an eerily good job of putting highly relevant resources at the top of the search results.
One nice feature: Every page is cached on the company’s servers, so even if a site is down (or dead) the saved copy is available.
One can’t help but wonder why the feds–who gave us the primordial Internet in the first place–couldn’t have developed this service all by themselves.