You
can find great graphics, information, and other resources on the
Internet by using a search engine. Did you know that of the hundreds of different
search engines on the Internet, there are two main kinds that can
produce completely different results?
The
most commonly used search engines like Yahoo! are actually search
directories that require people to submit their sites to the directory.
The results come from “hits” from the submitted descriptions.
With dynamic web content this can be problematic since the
links are often outdated or even removed.
Still, because of their popularity, the databases are very
large and yield many results.
Some general search directories
include:
1.
Yahoo! – http://yahoo.com. One of the most widely used directories with
an enormous database.
2.
The Open Directory Project – http://dmoz.org. Formerly known as NewHoo, this has an even bigger database than Yahoo! but relies
on volunteers to catalog the sites.
3.
AskJeeves – http://www.askjeeves.com. Simple and easy to use, but results are excellent.
Good for beginning searchers.
Crawler-based
search engines including Google generate their listings without human intervention.
Their robots "crawl" or "spider" the web for
meta tags, keywords, page titles, and other information.
These crawler-based search engines are helpful because as
web content changes, they spider the new content and automatically
update the search. This yields
a lot less “dead links” with more reliable results. Many of the general search directories are becoming
hybrids, for example, Yahoo! now incorporates Google’s
search results.
Some
crawler-based search engines include:
1.
Google – http://www.google.com. This is one of the only search engines that
also archives PDF files which are especially
prevalent in education and research.
It also does Boolean searches for more accurate results.
2.
AltaVista – http://www.altavista.com. One of
the oldest crawler-based search engines on the Web (Dec.1995). It offers many resources including free foreign
language translation but does not reduce redundancy.
3.
About – http://www.about.com.
This site is a good place to start with general searches
on popular topics.
Meta search engines are crawler-based engines that use a
combination of techniques to search the search engines themselves. They are your best choice for topics that are
difficult to find. Here are
some metasearch engines:
1.
Dogpile – http://www.dogpile.com. The motto sums up the experience, “all results,
no mess.”
Basic site with good functionality and relevance.
2.
Queryserver – http://www.queryserver.com. This utlizes a set
of metasearch engines and organizes results
logically.
3.
All4One – http://www.all4one.com
. This search engine displays
four windows with results from different search engines but can
get confusing.
4.
Vivisimo – http://vivisimo.com. This well-organized search engine searcher does
a great job clustering relevant findings.
5.
Ixquick – http://www.ixquick.com. This meta search engine
is excellent for finding media such as mp3s and pictures in addition
to the usual tasks.
6.
Metor – http://metor.com. Search among set channels or specific search
engines or directories. Fast
results with redundancies eliminated.
If
you haven’t tried the last few on the list, you don’t know what
you are missing in web searches! Many of these meta
search engines already have built-in search functions to provide
the results you want. For
example, you can select if you want to search for all of the words
in the phrase, any of the words, or an exact match.
If these options are not provided, you can maximize your
search by following a few tips. |
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