Search Engines are what makes the 'Net easy to use. In the Internet's early days, the only way to find a page or file was to ask a friend or visit home page after home page hoping to find a reference for it. Now all that is changed, and with the click of a mouse you can find that program, person, or page that you've been looking for.
The most requested and most often used search engines are those that search the World Wide Web. Below is a list of these search engines. To search a particular engine, just type the word or phrase you are searching for in the box and click on the Search button. For more detailed information on each site, including Tips and Tricks for searching, click on the image with the name of the search engine; your browser will be transported to their Home Page.
Tips and Trix: The real story here is as follows: The only engines that I use these days are INFOSEEK-ULTRA and METACRAWLER. Reasons being: INFOSEEK-ULTRA is the first search engine that I have found that can tolerate more than one word. A lot of the others say that you can search for more than one word, but if you put in two it only gets hits for the first one anyway. Infoseek Ultra will take your request very literally. I.E., if you search for "World Series" you'll get back pages about "World Series," not pages about the world and pages about number series. Also, Ultra allows for omissions on the search line. In other words, you type Barney -Fife -maim -kill and you get only pages for the happy purple dinosaur and maybe a couple of people named Barney who aren't from Andy Griffith and aren't axe murderers. A good example of success with Ultra follows: I was looking for information on the singer Howard Jones. Searching for that on any other search engine would get me, at best, all people named Howard Jones, if not all people named Howard and named Jones. But with Ultraseek, I specified the query as "Howard Jones" music and was greeted with pages only about the topic I wanted. Clues: put quotation marks around the words if they are to be treated as a phrase. Capitalized words will be treated as case-sensitive searches. METACRAWLER not only combines all the other search engines' results, it can validate them by checking for "404 Not Found" errors and not even returning those.
At the bottom of the page are links to other Non-WWW search engines that can help you find a specific person, site, or file.
 |
Infoseek is one of the original compreshensive search engines on the Internet. It is capable of searching the WWW, USENET News, and E-Mail addresses. |
 |
Infoseek Ultra is a highly-recommended search engine that boasts Automatic Proper Name and Phrase Recognition among others. It was the first (and remains one of the few) that can search for a phrase or more than one word. Although it was unclear in late 1996, InfoSeek Ultra appears to have merged with InfoSeek. |
 |
Lycos was one of the first search engines to attempt to tackle the vastness of the Internet and is a very comprehensive resource. It can also search for Pictures and Sounds. |
 |
Altavista Search uses Altavita's searching technology to search across the WWW for home pages and USENET articles. |
 |
What's New lists all new sites on the Internet. |
 |
Excite is an exhaustive index of over 50 million WWW Pages and 2 weeks of UseNet archives. |
 |
OpenText WWW Search Engine allows searches in WWW Pages. You also can browse more specific categories such as cartoons, Cool Sites, etc. |
 |
HotBot is the search engine of WIRED magazine. A state-of-the-art WWW search engine, it has many user-configurable options such as Date, Media Type, and Geographical Location. |
 |
Yahoo! is an excellent place to begin surfing by browsing through the categorically-organized site. The search bar below links to the "New Yahoo" search engine. |
 |
Webcrawler was one of the first WWW search engines on the Internet. It contains a vast index of the WWW which is updated daily. |
 |
Metacrawler is not a Search Engine itself, but it contacts most of the big WWW search engines and compiles their results into a page for you. This is very useful because each WWW Search Engine indexes differently and may contain different information. Metacrawler can also "Validate" the results so that sites that no longer exist are excluded from the final results. |
[This Page Was Originally Designed by me for home.interpath.net, a project of Interpath Web Development Services]
