Search Engines

Before you use any search engine, you should have a search strategy. For guidance in developing an Internet search strategy, look here. Otherwise, some of the most popular and powerful search engines are:

	AllTheWeb -- AlltheWeb's index (provided by Yahoo!) includes billions of web pages, as well as tens of millions of PDF and MS Word® files. Yahoo! frequently scans the entire web to ensure that our content is fresh and to eliminate broken links.
	AltaVista -- AltaVista, a business of Overture Services, Inc., is a leading provider of search services and technology. AltaVista continues to advance Internet search with new technologies and features designed to improve the search experience for consumers.
	Ask (formerly Ask Jeeves) -- Ask's innovative search technologies deliver fast and relevant information for millions of people every day. With Ask, you can search the Web, images, city, news, blogs, video, and maps and directions.
	ditto.com -- Want a picture (or 582) of Aishwarya Rai? ditto.com provides a visual mechanism to search the web using pictures instead of text. Ditto displays thumbnails -- and links to each image's home page.
	Google -- Google is designed to impose order on information chaos. This search engine consistently returns good results using PageRank techniques that determine the relevancy of search results by analyzing the number of websites that point to any page returned by a query. Google uses sophisticated text-matching techniques and returns results with page excerpts along with highlighted search terms."
	Lycos -- Developed at Carnegie Mellon University, Lycos is one of the most comprehensive search engines for WWW, gopher and FTP sites. Boolean functions and adjacency are supported, though not with the normal syntax. Results are ranked for relevance.
	Metacrawler -- MetaCrawler uses innovative metasearch technology to search the Internet's top search engines, including Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN Search, Ask, and more. With one single click, MetaCrawler searches the best results from the combined pool of the world's leading search engines -- instead of results from only one single search engine. And MetaCrawler makes it easy to refine your search so you can find the most meaningful results right away.
	Yahoo -- Yahoo offers news headlines, weather, and market activity along with a very popular email service from its main page.

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Please send comments and/or suggestions to Tom Anderson, Librarian. This page was revised January 3, 2008.