It's taken less than two years for Google to go from an upstart search engine to being a de facto benchmark. It's quick. It's simple. And it has an uncanny knack of finding what you want much of the time.

But new search engines have been popping up. They include Teoma, WiseNut and Vivisimo. They promise to get you what you're looking for faster. And, in select circumstances, they deliver.

Teoma (www.teoma.com) is very effective at finding expert sites, clearing houses of information on a subject that can give you lists of links to use in research.

WiseNut (www.wisenut.com) is trying to outpace Google in the sheer number of Web pages that it has checked.

Understanding the upstarts requires understanding what made Google such a groundbreaker.

The earliest search engines worked by taking the wording of a search and looking for the same pattern of words among millions of Web pages.

They could help you find a specific Web page, but the result you wanted could be mixed in with thousands of other listings that were irrelevant.

What Google did was change the paradigm by listing the most popular websites first, since those are most likely to be the sites someone is searching for.

To do this, Google looked at links between pages. The idea is that if I put a link to your page on my website, I'm voting for it. If 10,000 people vote by linking to a Web page, chances are that it's a pretty useful spot.

"Google changed the landscape. They showed if you had better technology and people tried it, they would switch," said Mr Paul Gardi, president of Teoma.

The internet consists of hundreds of thousands of interlocking communities. Some are organised around a subject. Some are organised around an affiliation or a geographic region.

Communities might include enthusiasts of old Beatles albums, sites for owners of Dodge minivans, or sites that relate to coal- mining towns in Appalachia.

Mr Apostolos Gerasoulis, a computer science professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, came up with a way to identify these communities and then put your search question only to communities that may be relevant.

The result is Teoma, a site that looks at a relatively small subset of the Web when answering a question.

In practice, Teoma's focus helps a lot when you are first exploring a very broad subject.

It gives you a good list of results and a list of expert sites that have tons of links within the community.

One drawback is that the site has indexed only about 100 million Web pages, far less than most of the others listed here. Mr Gardi says that amount will increase.

WiseNut is the most Google-like of the upstarts. Started by Mr Yeogirl Yun, a founder of shopping comparison site mySimon. com, it is spare and fast. There's very little clutter in the results.

It claims to have indexed 1.5 billion Web pages that it can use in its searches. Google claims 1.6 billion.

Breadth doesn't guarantee you'll get what you want. But if you're looking for something obscure, it can help.

WiseNut also has a "sneak-a- peek" feature that allows you to glance at the Web pages listed in your results without actually jumping to them.

On the downside, WiseNut's text sometimes is too small to read easily. One key feature, dividing searches into categories, doesn't work nearly as well as on Vivisimo and Teoma.

Strictly speaking, Vivisimo (www.vivisimo.com) is not a search engine. Created by researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University, it is a meta search engine, which means it takes a question and puts it to a series of other search engines. Vivisimo organises the results into a usable list with subject categories.

At Google, a search under the word "apple" gives you a long list of websites related to Apple Computers. The same query on Vivisimo offers a series of categories. One gives links about the computers. But it also offers categories for farms and orchards, cider, recipes and singer Fiona Apple.

If you were interested in any of these latter nuances, Google would make things a little harder unless you had typed in a more detailed search.

Teoma and WiseNut also provide category listings, although they're not as comprehensive.

Vivisimo's biggest drawback is that it can be slower than the others because it doesn't do the searches itself.

And Google hasn't been standing still. It's been increasing the breadth of its indexing and adding resources. You can use it to search archived postings from usenet groups, the subject-oriented discussion groups on the internet.

Responding to criticism about its news content, the site has been adding three news story headlines at the top of each results page.

With all the new search activity, there are still plenty of easy questions that can leave any of the search sites stumped.

Another pitfall is in the freshness of each engine's content. The Web is a great place to keep up-to-date on the US attacks on Afghanistan.

Type in "Afghanistan map" and all the engines will give you a good overview of the country.

But type in "Taliban news" and all of them come up short. Most of the links are to articles from July or even two years ago. That's because most search engines, Google included, index Web pages only once every few weeks or even less frequently.

Most Web pages don't change that often but news is a big exception.

Mr Craig Silverstein, Google's director of technology, says the company has been working on more frequent updates of pages that change regularly, including those that deal with news.

Still, if you want the latest stuff, you've got to go to a specialised search engine.

One of the best is Moreover.com. This site enables you to search headlines off nearly every news site, from CNN to the newspaper in Eugene, Oregon.

Another worth checking is Daypop.com. It scans and searches several thousand news websites.