Are you wondering which search engine to use?  You can read the descriptions below, or click here to a link on choosing search engines. 

 AltaVista -- Alta Vista is the search engine from Digital Research. It combines the ability to keyword search both the World Wide Web and over 13,000 Usenet Newsgroups. Alta Vista has a clean search interface; its advanced options allow you to search for words and phrases using Boolean and, or, and not as well as near. You can rank the relevance of each of your search terms, and have Alta Vista sort your search results.

  Excite -- Excite is a search engine that uses concept-based technology to identify the most important themes of the Web sites being indexed. Excite claims that where other search engines, such as Lycos, only return the first few lines of text extracted from a Web page, by indexing concepts, Excite returns a much more valuable description of the Web site.

  HotBot -- HotBot claims to be the most comprehensive Web Search engine available. Based on the Inktomi search engine technology, HotBot has a simple search mode and an advanced form, which allows search limiting by date, location, and media type (e.g., multimedia, java, Adobe Acrobat, VRML). HotBot will search for words, phrases, Boolean expressions, for people's names, and for URL's. HotBot indexes both the Web, and like DejaNews, Usenet News archives.

 Inference Find -- Inference find is a very powerful meta-engine, that claims to "call out in parallel all the best search engines, merges the results, removes redundancies, clusters the hits into neat understandable groupings." Inference Find currently searches: WebCrawler, Yahoo, Lycos, Alta Vista, InfoSeek, and Excite. Results are organized by type of domain (e.g., .com, .edu, .gov).

  Infoseek -- This is the search tool many people are familiar with from the Internet Explorer Search button. It is a quick and powerful World Wide Web search engine with limited specialized searching syntax and proximity searching.

  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 is a World Wide Web search service developed in 1994 at the University of Washington by Erik Selberg, Oren Etzioni and Greg Lauckhart. It differs from other search services in that it does not maintain any local database. Rather, it relies on the databases of various Web-based sources. MetaCrawler sends your queries to several Web search engines, including Lycos, Infoseek, WebCrawler, Excite, AltaVista, and Yahoo. MetaCrawler queries the other search engines, organizes the results into a uniform format, ranks them by relevance, and returns them to the user. Of course, this means that MetaCrawler is slightly slower than other engines, but is more likely to obtain accurate results for your query.

 Northern Light -- Northern Light is a search service that saves busy people time by providing the quality information needed to meet the challenges of modern living. It accomplishes this with Custom Search Folders, premium quality sources, and an integrated results list of Web and premium information.

 Yahoo -- Yahoo is a hierarchical subject-oriented guide for the World Wide Web and Internet. Yahoo lists sites and categorizes them into a multi-level subject hierarchy. Yahoo also offers extensive keyword search capabilities. Searches can be performed over the whole Yahoo site, or limited to a particular subject level.

Ask Jeeves - Ask Jeeves is a fast, smart, and easy way to find information on the web.  It's the first natural language search service with answers to the most popular questions asked online. Ask Jeeves for Kids, designed with safety in mind, has a research team for child-appropriate content.

Kids Click - a great search engine for kids, offering appropriate sites that have been selected by librarians . Try the Online Tutorial to improve your search skills.

Dogpile -  a Metasearch engine that searches Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, AltaVista, InfoSeek, and other search engines.

Google -Google uses sophisticated next-generation technology to produce the right results fast with every query. Google  ranks relevant websites based on the link structure of the Internet itself.

 

There are dozens of different search engines on the Web; they all work somewhat differently, and they all produce somewhat different results. For help in choosing and using a search engine, go to The Spider's Apprentice, Search Engines: What They Are, How They Work, and Practical Suggestions for Getting the Most Out of Them, or Getting the most out of Guides and Search Engines.

A good portion of this information was prepared by Mr Tom Anderson, Oakmont Regional High School, Library Media Specialist.

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