Search Engines

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SEARCH ENGINES

Search engines often find many sites, and there's no way of knowing which of the sites you need without testing them. To be sure that your own Web site appears in searches, you should register it with the major search enginges. Most allow you to do that. But beware, registering with search engines usually means you'll be getting more junk email since it makes you visible to spammers.

In the past few years, the major search engines transmogrified into portals that pre-select the hits displayed for the more common searches. The portals say they save us time by screening and rejecting large numbers of irrelevant sites. Maybe so. Sometimes the portals' search results are right on the money; sometimes you need to make broader searches with a less selective search engine.

For more information about selling search results, see Commercial Alert Files Complaint Against Search Engines for Deceptive Ads and Buying Your Way into Search Engines.

	2ask Over 1000 searchable databases, or CyberGadgets, on topics of all sorts.
	About.com More an encyclopedia than a portal. A really good resource sometimes.
	All the Web Most comprehensive search engine, indexing 25%. "Plans" to index the whole Web by end of 1999.
	all4one Search Engine Yahoo, Lycos, Webcrawler and Alta Vista in 4 frames. Hard to use because of the small size of the frames, but sometimes convenient nevertheless.
	Alta Vista Used to be the best search engine but now heavily "portalized." Its indexing of the Usenet has deteriorated.
	Bot Spot Omnibus site for Web-searching robots, including some you can download and run from your own computer.
	Dogpile Packages your query, sends it to the top dozen search engines, and displays the results. A handy way, well, about as handy as you can find, to do a comprehensive search, but beware that many of the search engines yield paid-for results.
	Excite Another Yahoo look-alike.
	Google Selects sites on basis of their popularity, that is, how often they are accessed by other sites--"To go where everyone has gone before."
	HotBot Good access to newsgroups on the Usenet.
	InfoSeek Another Yahoo look-alike.
	ixquick Metasearch engine; compiles and displays results from numerous search engines.
	Lycos Another Yahoo look-alike.
	Magellan A good Yahoo look-alike.
	Netscape Search Engine Another Yahoo look-alike; has prominent links to the other Yahoo look-alikes. Recently licensed the Google technology.
	Oingo Meanings-based searches, whatever that means. Actually, seems more point-and-click than meanings-based.
	Raging Search Text-only version of AltaVista. No banner ads, but paid-for results.
	WebCrawler An Excite clone.
	W3 Search Engines Links to every good search engine and portal on the Web. Includes gopher, WAIS, FTP and other non-Web search engines, as well as search engines in other (non-English) languages. An excellent resource.
	Yahoo The archetypal Web portal. - Searching the Web Includes a set of links to sites that have comparisons and ratings of search engine sites, which in turn have links to other sites, which have links to other sites, which have ... "I don't have time to search. I'm too busy comparing search engines!"