What is a Search Engine?
This is a very old definition, but
What is a search
engine?
A search engine can be defined as a web site with tools which help your find
information on the Internet. There are several different types of search
engines, according to what they are used to search for:
World Wide Web search engines are used for finding web documents. These come in
two basic flavours: those that continually sift through the links in its
database adding new and updated pages to its database (à la AltaVista) and those
that contain manually added links or reviews of web sites (à la Yahoo).
Newsgroup search engines can help you find threaded discussions on specific
topics. For example, if you are having a hardware problem and your BIOS gives
you nothing more than a cryptic message to go on, entering this cryptic message
as a search parameter can lead you to messages by other people who have had this
very same problem, letting you see how they worked through it.
MetaSearch sites cull the results from several search engines and present them
to you on a single screen.
White Pages services are used for finding e-mail addresses.
Here is a breakdown of a number of search engine sites and what they do for you:
Site name and URL Web content Usenet Metasearch White Pages Comments
Indexed Reviewed
AltaVista - http://www.altavista.digital.com/ My personal favourite for web
content.
Excite - http://www.excite.com/
Hotbot - http://www.hotbot.com/ Sometimes returns more hits than AltaVista, you
may also find it easier to use.
Infoseek - http://www.infoseek.com/ Features both indexed and reviewed sections,
for example the educational research section.
Lycos - http://www.lycos.com/ Some may find its insistence on going straight to
the Spanish version annoying.
Magellan - http://www.mckinley.com/ Makes it easy choose whether to search all
web sites or just rated sites. Has rated "green light" sites.
Open Text Index - http://index.opentext.net/ Has recently modified its approach
to target business users.
WebCrawler - http://www.webcrawler.com/ Reviewed content a recent addition;
falls a bit short on content.
Yahoo - http://www.yahoo.com/ My favourite for locating a specific organization.
DejaNews - http://www.dejanews.com/
Reference.COM - http://www.reference.com/
All4One - http://www.all4one.com/ Calls four sites and conveniently displays
them in four frames. It also managed to provoke a 'blue screen' error on my
computer.
Highway 61 - http://www.highway61.com/ A search engine with a sense of humour.
It calls 7 sites, including Yahoo, Excite, HotBot, Infoseek and Lycos.
MetaCrawler - http://www.metacrawler.com/ Calls 9 sites, including Excite,
Lycos, Open Text and WebCrawler.
Savvy Search - http://guaraldi.cs.colostate.edu:2000/form Available in over two
dozen languages, this search engine draws upon even more sites.
Bigfoot - http://www.bigfoot.com/
Switchboard - http://www.switchboard.com/
Four11 - http://www.four11.com/ My personal favourite.
internet @ddress.finder - http://www.iaf.net/ This one's only listing for me is
an e-mail address that I had for about three months over three years ago.
WhoWhere? - http://www.whowhere.net/
Site name and URL Indexed Reviewed Usenet Metasearch White Pages Comments
Web content
This is one man's opinion. Not mine.
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