There are so many free scholarship search engines available to students online—you'll get about 7 million results by Googling "scholarship search"—that it can be difficult to know which websites to use. It's a good idea to set up profiles on multiple sites so you catch as many opportunities as possible. Which sites you choose is up to you, but in case you need some help with your decision-making, I've looked at three key elements of several free search engines: how often their data is updated, whether they keep your information private, and what's unique about each of them.

 

 CollegeBoard.com: The College Board was founded in 1900 and currently helps 7 million students annually prepare for higher education. The College Board began publishing their book of scholarships in 1997 and since then has made the information available online. Their scholarship database contains more than 2,300 scholarship opportunities, totaling nearly $3 billion.

 

 

Fastweb.com: Fastweb, which has helped 50 million students find money since the site was founded 15 years ago, was the first online scholarship matching service and the first free national scholarship matching service. Fastweb's site indicates they currently have roughly 1.5 million scholarships worth $3.4 billion in their database.

 

Scholarships.com: Founded in 1999, Scholarships.com now claims to be the largest free and independent scholarship search and financial aid information resource on the Internet, with more than 2.7 million scholarships worth a total of $19 billion in their database.