Search Engines

Launched Sept. 21, 1999. An "I'm Feeling Lucky^TM" button automatically takes you to the first web page returned for your query. (Google assigns "votes" to pages based on links and assesses pages by their votes. Links on pages with high votes are cast a heavier weight. Pages are then ranked.) A math term, "googol", represents the number 1 followed by one hundred zeros.

SEARCH ENGINES

Teoma

The newest search engine from those who brought AskJeeves.

Thunderstone Web Site Catalog

Thunderstone automatically checks every Internic-registered domain.

HotBot

HotBot lets you use wild-card characters in search strings. Find sites with a particular technology such as JavaScript or Shockwave using this engine's ability to limit searches to Web pages that contain specific technologies by checking the appropriate box in the Expert mode. Don't enter any words in the Search box. Limited Boolean features: All of the Words menu is the same as Boolean AND, and Any of the Words is the same as "OR". Execute exclusionary searches by clicking on the small "+" symbol next to the Modify button on the left-hand side of the page, and then choose Must Not from the new drop-down menu. The Cyberplace and Geoplace options in Expert mode narrows searches to a particular site, a class of domains (eg. edu), or a geographic location (eg. North America or Europe). Save your configuration of HotBot's interface by moving to the bottom of the page and setting Set as Default in the small purple box.

Hit the SuperSearch link to narrow the search with additional words, date restrictions, etc.

HotBot is one of PI's favourite search engines as it employs the HTML coding to present website information. You will see descriptions that HTML coders present rather than the first paragraph of page content information. This means you get author's annotation of the website.

Owned by Lycos and associated with wired magazine, HotBot includes more advanced features than most. Its Advanced Search page permits extreme fine-tuning of your search.

Lycos

Has an impressive, but slightly awkward set of advanced search features. Scours Web, FTP, and Gopher sites. Don't use this engine unless you want to exclude a certain term from your search or conduct a proximity search, it permits only OR and AND searches. Lycos also has trouble dealing with terms that start with numbers, such as 3DO. Therefore, it's more suited to simple searches on common topics. Customize Your Search with the Advanced Search section to enter a number of alternative spellings. Example: Match 2 Terms and type Lethbridge Lethbridge Alberta for listing pages with any two of these words. Use Customize Your Search and change the default option from Loose Match to a more restrictive option such as Strict Match. Increase the Display Option default from 10 to 40 results. For greater detail, click on Customize Your Search, then select Detailed Results from the drop-down Display Options menu.

InfoSeek Net Search

Infoseek's searches the Web, Usenet, Web frequently asked questions (FAQs), e-mail addresses, current news, and company listings. Use commas to separate phrases typically encased in quotes; hyphenate words that need to be next to each other; put a minus sign in front of a word to exclude it from the search; and use a plus sign to require that a word appear in all retrieved sites. Capitalize all proper names, such as Lethbridge or Alberta. Surrounding a pair of words with brackets will find sites that use the two terms within 100 words of each other. Includes quick links to Nynex Information Technologies' BigYellow phone directory site, and headline news stories from Reuters NewMedia.

ICQ
Help

Notes: Search the web from your desktop.

Magellan

l.. INFORMATION COMING

Washington's WebCrawler

link-back search method lets you see who is linking to a particular Web site; Use the Special button at the top of the page to access the Surf the Web Backwards link-back feature. Once there, simply type in a Web address to find sites that link to it. Use the Best of the Net listing service for reviews of Web sites and recommendations. Use WebCrawler primarily for finding sites related to common topics like computer companies and software retailers. Has useful Boolean features. Employ proximity searching by entering a number to retrieve pages in which terms are near each other in a document. Select Summaries instead of Titles on the home page to get more detailed information about found pages.

Yahoo Search Engine

is primarily a directory, a list of Web sites manually submitted and then sorted into categories. Quickly narrow your search from Yahoo's top menu before entering your first search term. For repeat searches, bookmark the pages retrieved by your queries and come back to resubmit the original search. Yahoo's Options link will refine your search to include only the most recently posted pages or to use Boolean terms.

Open Text Index

offers a strong expert search feature, including Boolean functions no other engine can match. Open Text Index catalogs every word on every page it finds. Use the service's expert searching option to find names: Power Search, Open Text's expert option, offers standard Boolean searches and divides the NEAR category into NEAR and FOLLOWED BY. To narrow searches to specific sites or even individual pages, combine words from any part of a Web document with a URL and/or the title given to the page by its author. For maximum effectiveness, search for both the singular and plural forms of words. Use Open Text Index's Improve Your Results option to locate information at a single site; enter the Web address in the first Search For box and choose URL from the adjacent drop-down list box.

PlanetSEARCH

l.. INFORMATION COMING

Excite

Use Excite when you're not sure of the exact term you need as it conceptual searches the Web, Usenet, and Excite's Web site reviews. Use shorthand Boolean terms: "+" for "AND" or "-" for "AND NOT"; use as many words as you can; employ the small button next to each rating on your search results to find other sites with similar topics; besides the default Sort by Confidence display mode, use Sort by Site to group the returned pages by location for reaching more sites that are related to your chosen topic.

This popular, full-service search portal also owns the WebCrawler metasearch and Magellan.

AOL netfind

l.. INFORMATION COMING

Northern Light

Perform a search, then click on one of the Custom Search Folders to narrow it.

Use many words in your search. Use or to retrieve documents that include any of the search words (rather than most), or use not to indicate a word that must not appear. Northern Light does not currently support full boolean expressions. Use quotes around specific phrases to focus your search on occurrences of the actual phrase. Use a + (plus) to indicate words that must be present in the documents and a - (minus) for those that must not be present. There should be a space before the plus/minus but no space between the plus/minus and the word to which the plus/minus applies.

In addition to a large index of Web pages, Northern Light offers paid access to a special collection of articles not available elsewhere. It optionally accepts plain-English queries, has an impressive set of powerful search features, and automatically organizes results into folders containing similar items

LOOKSMART

features a navigation interface that distinguishes it from other search engines.

Digital's Alta Vista

Notes: Use the Advanced Search button at the top of all AltaVista pages to do complex searches. Beware of the syntax: Don't merely type NOT for exclusionary searches as per their instruction; type AND NOT to make an exclusion work. Use quotation marks to find a phrase; without the quotes, you will get every instance of each individual word. In advanced searches, use the Results Ranking Criteria box whenever possible to get a sorted list. Consider finding a useful message thread by changing the home page's Search menu from the Web to Usenet.

Use the Refine button to weed out hits that don't meet your needs. Alta Vista groups what it finds into topic categories. Submit your search, click Refine, then choose which topics you don't want to see.

AltaVista includes a directory of categories. Its related BabelFish site provides multilingual translations of phrases or entire Web sites.

About.com

There is an expert guide, accessible via e-mail for each of About.com's categories.

Brittanica.com

Search the Internet, the Encyclop�dia Brittanica and a database of magazines and books at the same time.

Copernic

The free Copernic utility program simultaneously calls more than a dozen search engines, collates results, optionally downloads result pages, and permits searching within the downloaded pages.

DirectHit

returns short lists of the most relevant results.

Fast Search

Increasing in popularity. Indexes many pages. Built on a partnership between Dell and Fast Search and Transfer. It is fast and has an impressive set of advanced search features.

Snap

NBC Internet's search portal with GlobalBrain technology with searching that you can personalize.

All-in-One Internet Search

Starting Point

ALIWEB Search Form

TradeWave Galaxy

GOTO.COM (WWWW - WORLD WIDE WEB WORM WORLD WIDE WEB WORM)
offers categories and many advanced features--including Express Search, a free, downloadable metasearch utility.

Process Search Page

MSN

The Yellow Pages