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With billions of pages on the Internet, finding
what one is searching for sometimes feels like looking for a
needle in a hay stack. Try some of the search tools on this
page to help you find what you are looking for. Please try
more than one because they all work a little differently and may
bring back different results. Many of these sites
are incorporating both crawler/search engines and
directories to provide better search results. Some are now
Portals providing many other services such as free e-mail accounts
and personalized pages that display one's personal preferences
(stock quotes, sport scores, local weather, etc.).
Crawler/search engine sites use special
software that "crawls" the Web (often called robots, bot,
spider or crawler) looking for content. These sites work
best for more specific, narrow topics. Below is a list of
some popular Search Engines.
| AllTheWeb |
AlltheWeb's index is provided by Yahoo
and includes billions of web pages. It indexes
PDF files, News, Pictures, Videos, MP3 files, FTP and
Microsoft Word, Excel and Power Point files. It
claims its search features allow anyone to find anything
faster than with any other search engine. A business
of Overture Services, Inc. |
| AltaVista |
Uses directories in addition to
crawler-powered searches to bring back relevant responses.
Offers a wide range of power searching commands.
Alta Vista does provides search categories for Image,
Audio, Video and News. A business of Overture
Services, Inc. |
| Google |
One of the largest search engines on the
Internet, Google has become the pre-eminent Web search
engine. Among its many popular features are its
ability to search for Image files, PDF files, Usenet
Groups' posts, a powerful Directory, a News Search feature,
Froogle, and its cached
archives. |
| MSN
Search |
The new MSN Search includes a new search
engine, index and crawler; all built from the ground up on
Microsoft technology. Microsoft provides search of the web,
news, images and its own encyclopedia, Encarta. Also
offers desktop search via a toolbar. Other features
includes links to cached pages, consolidation of results
from the same domain, and automatic suggestion of alternate
search terms or spellings. Use the settings tab to customize
your settings; try the Search Builder feature to easily
refine your searches, etc. Select the Espaņol tab to
convert this search engine to Spanish. |
| Netscape |
A Portal owned by AOL Time Warner. Combining the tools of
the Open Directory and Netscape's own "Smart
Browsing" database along with the search engine
Google to bring up several types of results. |
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A directory site actually has human editors
that create its site listings. These sites are useful for
general topics. Below is a list of some popular Directory
Sites.
| About.com |
A Portal. The About network
consists of hundreds of Guide sites, created and
maintained human professional subject specialists.
neatly organized into 24 channels. The sites cover more
than 57,000 + topics with over 1 million links to the best
resources on the Net. In 2005 About, Inc. was
acquired by The New York Times Company(NYSE: NYT). |
| Librarians'
Index to the Internet |
A searchable, annotated subject directory
of more than 14,000 Internet resources selected and
evaluated by librarians for their usefulness to users of
public libraries. |
| Open Directory
Project |
Uses volunteers to create the largest
human reviewed directory on the Web. Their
slogan: "HUMANS do it better." Also
known as DMoz (from Directory.Mozilla.org, the original
domain name), it is owned by America Online. |
| WWW Virtual
Library |
A very extensive, high quality subject
catalog with an academic/research focus. |
| Yahoo |
A Portal. The oldest major
directory and one of the Internet's most popular search
sites. Yahoo uses human editors to index the
Internet. Yahoo has over 1 million
sites listed. It now uses the search engine Google
as its default search service. |
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Meta-search sites query other search engines
and/or directories for their search results. Meta-searches
are useful for specific searches.
| Clusty |
The clustering search engine. It
does not crawl or index the web but rather it organizes the
outputs of other search engines into meaningful groups for
easy browsing. All this is done in seconds. Good
Advanced Search features. |
| Dogpile |
Dogpile is a meta-search engine that
searches the Internet's top search engines such as Google,
Yahoo!.Search, MSN.Search, and Ask.com. When you use Dogpile, you are actually
searching many search engines simultaneously. |
| Ixquick |
When you search Ixquick, you are
searching many popular search engines at the same time.
Ixquick reports the results using its "star
rating" system, only reporting top ten results
from each search engine. |
| KartOO |
Co-founded in France by two cousins,
Laurent and Nicholas Baleydier. "KartOO is a
metasearch engine with visual display interfaces. When you
click on OK, KartOO launches the query to a set of search
engines, gathers the results, compiles them and represents
them in a series of interactive maps through a proprietary
algorithm." |
| MetaCrawler |
"MetaCrawler uses innovative metasearch
technology to search the Internet's top search engines,
including Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN Search, Ask Jeeves,
About, MIVA, LookSmart and more." Owned by
InfoSpace, Inc. |
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Uses natural language to search the Internet.
| Ask.com |
Formerly Ask Jeeves. This
excellent search technology uses the Teoma database to offer
search for web sites, news, weather reports, pictures,
stocks, people or products. "The power of the Teoma
algorithm, now known as ExpertRank, makes Ask search
technology one of the world's most powerful and unique
search engines." |
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