- Information verified and
updated June, 2001
The Internet has tens of millions
of sites at this point; growth
is exponential and bibliographic
control does not exist. To find
the proverbial needle in this
immense haystack (or tiny fly
in the Web), you may use two basic
approaches: a search engine or
a subject guide such as Yahoo, Snap, LookSmart,
and Magellan.
Subject guides are fine for browsing
general topics, but for specific
information use a search engine.
Your output can be greatly improved
by spending time learning the
nuances of several search tools.
Their on-line help pages have
in-depth information.
All search engines do keyword
searches against a database, but
various factors influence the
results from each. Size of the
database, frequency of update,
search capability and design,
and speed may lead to amazingly
different results. Recent addition
of new content, redesign and partnership
changes have fulfilled the mission
of the new name: portals. This
name implies a starting point
and central location for all uses
of the Web. We prepared these
documents to help users understand
the differences between some of
the most popular search engines.
There are also metasearch sites
or metacrawlers that send searches
to several search engines. Since
metasearch engines do not allow
for input of many search variables,
their best use is to find hits
on obscure items or to see if
something is on the Internet.
Some of the best-known ones are Dogpile, Mamma, Metacrawler,
and SavvySearch.
Quick
Reviews
Click on a search engine name
to go to that site. Click on "Our
Review" for a more detailed
review.
AltaVista - Our
Review - Summary: one of the
largest and most comprehensive
search engines available, it searches
the entire HTML file.
Excite - Our Review - Summary: concept searching is
a strong feature for narrowing
down the search.
Google – Our Review – Summary: Perhaps the largest
search engine on the Web, capable
of searching 1,247,340,000 web
pages.
HotBot - Our Review - Summary: has some unique search
features that make this a very
useful search engine, including
sorting results by date or media
type.
Lycos - Our Review - Summary: one of the oldest search
tools on the Internet, but keeping
up-to-date with a variety of result
options available.
Northern
Light - Our
Review - Summary: the newest
one with good, extensive content
and a feature for classification
of hits by division into custom
search folders.
For more
information on any of these search
engines, see the help files located
on their sites.
See
also Search Engine Watch and Search
Engine Showdown
and their
comparison of search engine reviews. |
