Revised: September 15, 2000Search Engines
Search engines can be a good way to find specific information, but they can also be frustrating -- you often get too few or too many results. Search engines fall into several categories:
Traditional, Automated Search Engines
- All the Web(www.alltheweb.com) -- very fast and very large index; can search for FTP, MP3, and picture files using Lycos
- Excite (www.excite.com)
- Infoseek (www.infoseek.com) -- same as Go.com (www.go.com)
- Hotbot (www.hotbot.com)
- Northern Light (www.northernlight.com) - one of the largest indexes, groups results by category
Meta-Search Engines
- Copernic (www.copernic.com) - presents results from several search engines, with duplicates removed; this search engine is very different than any of the other search engines listed here -- it comes in a free and a $40 and $80 version whereas all other engines presented here are free, and it requires you to download and install the software, which the others don't
- Dogpile (www.dogpile.com) - presents results from several search engines, grouped by search engine
- Inferencefind (www.infind.com) - groups various search engines' results into subject categories
- Metacrawler (www.metacrawler.com) - presents a single list, but the list is compiled from the results of a number of search engines, so the more search engines return a site, the higher it would appear in the list
- Savvysearch (www.savvysearch.com) - can do specialty searches (email addresses, music files, etc.)
Some Human Input
- About (www.about.com) - Formerly the Mining Company - Keeps itself in top frame, which frustrates bookmarking and keeps space, unless you close frame
- Altavista (www.altavista.com or www.av.com) -- Traditionally one of the best known automated search engines, Altavista in addition now uses Ask Jeeves to display that it knows the answers to a number of questions, and each question has a drowdown box that varies one portion of the question.
- AOL (www.aol.com) - Presents categories, then individual search results
- Ask Jeeves (www.ask.com) - Phrase searches in natural language; if you have a question that many others have asked, this is a good place to look - It gives you a list of possible questions, often with dropdown lists for other locations, etc., and drop-down lists for the top ten results from Webcrawler, About.com, Excite, and Altavista.
- Look Smart (www.looksmart.com) - Results seemed to be of average quality
- Lycos (www.lycos.com) - Presents categories, then individual search results
- Netscape Open Directory (www.dmoz.org) - Done by volunteeer editors in each category, so dependent on the quality of the volunteer, but initial look was promising
- Snap (www.snap.com) - 1-2 sentence reviews of top sites reviewed by editor presented along with site link (unlike Webcrawler); also presents top sites submitted by members
- Webcrawler (www.webcrawler.com) - organized around categories, like Yahoo; contains 1-2 sentence reviews of sites, although it may be simpler just to go to the site since you have to go to another screen to get the review
- Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) - the most visited site on the Internet
Ordering of Search Results Reflect Other Input
- Direct Hit (www.directhit.com) - Direct Hit looks at which sites users click on when presented with a search result and how long they stay at that site -- This data is incorporated into the database, and thus sites that previous users found useful in response to a given search, tend to bubble toward the top of the results list. In trying it out on February 24, 2000 I find the results to be not as good as other search engines -- too few sites and the popularity rankings seemed wrong -- and the site seemed slow.
- Google (www.google.com) - The quality of a web page is judged by how many other web pages link to it. The results in my trial today were good. The Google cache feature allows you to look at the version of the web page that the engine used for indexing.
- MSN (www.msn.com) - They look for search trends and try to reflect this in the database. For example, in football season, "a search for 'bears' will probably mean the Chicago Bears, and people are more interested in buying tickets than finding general information." (Microsoft spokesman quoted in Newsweek, September 27, 1999, "The Perfect Search", pp. 71-72).
Finding Images or Pictures
- Ditto (www.ditto.com)
- Lycos RichMedia (www.richmedia.lycos.com) - returns thumbnail (i.e. small) versions of pictures in museums, with links to site