Search EnginesSearch engines collect information about web pages and allow users to search through that data. Each search engine looks for different information and organizes results differently, so one site may find what another might miss. As a result, it is worthwhile learning the tricks of your favorite search engines. Be ready to use more than one if you don't like the results you are getting. Below there are a few sites that we have found useful.
All The Web
- www.alltheweb.com (Help - Review)
What's Good: Very fast and comprehensive. Allows for a great deal of customized searching.
What's Not: Does not allow for more complicated searches (ex. Boolean operators).
Cool Feature: If you want to search for media (Video, music, etc), there are
separate searches to make it easy.
- www.altavista.com (Help - Review)
What's Good: Offers a wide and powerful array of search methods in its Advanced Search. Has one of the largest databases.
What's Not: Though AltaVista is supposed to be case insensitive, sometimes it is and sometimes it's not, meaning that results can be inconsistent.
Cool Feature: The image search (under "Search Tools"). Need an image? Use the Image Search to find hundreds (or thousands) of images. You can limit the search results to photographs, graphics, color or black and white. By right clicking (for PCs) or double clicking (for Macs), you can save any image to your hard drive or disk.
What's Good: Google is one of the biggest search engines, and, due to their method of measuring the use and popularity of sites, one of the best at finding just what you are looking for.
What's Not: Search results often contain redundant hits, making their total number of hits not quite accurate.
Cool Feature: You can limit your search to look for your search terms on a single domain (ex. site:www.nwic.edu) or, alternatively, you can exclude a domain (ex. -site:www.nwic.edu) to hone your search. Another interesting search allows you to find out how many pages are linked to a particular page (ex. links:www.nwic.edu).
- www.northernlight.com (Help - Review)
What's Good: If you're browsing, there are a lot of extra links here -- subjects of current interest, news stories -- it aims to be a "town commons" kind of place on the web.
What's Not: The home page is busy and distracting.
Cool Feature: GeoSearch, which lets you look for things a specified distance
from a place (your home, work) is neat, but a little flaky. Use phrase searching (Put the phrase in "quotes, like this") to get more precise results. A search for "Japanese food" 3 miles from my home still got hits for programming languages, but there were some good links, too.
Metasearch Engines -Metasearch engines take your search terms and run them on many search engines. This allows you to avoid the limitations of any one search engine by casting a wide net. One drawback is that the results can be somewhat random and unhelpful.
- www.dogpile.com (Help - Review)
What's Good: Because it searches such a wide array of search engines you can find obscure information very quickly.
What's Not: It's hard to tell how Dogpile will present your search to each search engine.
Cool Feature:Try entering an imaginary or unusual word and see which search engines find nothing and which find you places to buy stuff. You can learn a lot about how individual search engines process a search.
Directories -
Directories provide links to selected and categorized sites. Since people are choosing the sites and arranging them within a hierarchy, the sites tend to be of good quality. The downside is that they often have less range than search engines, since the amount of attention needed places a limit on the number of in the database.
- www.about.com (Help - Review)
What's Good: The topic areas are covered by enthusiasts, Guides, who collect a range of links with useful annotations. Very good place to start a search on an unfamiliar subject.
What's Not: If no one has put together a site subject you are interested in About will have little to offer.
Cool Feature: They have subject libraries that display their 700 Guide pages with brief annoatations. Makes for fun browsing.
What's Good: There is an amazing amount of stuff here. DMOZ is one of the largest directories.
What's Not: It's big and messy. It's sometimes hard to find what you want. The categories are only as good as the people who contribute to them, so quality can vary widely.
Cool Feature: Anyone can add links and help build the site. When it works, it's the DIY ("Do It Yourself") ethic of the internet at its finest.
- www.yahoo.com (Help - Review)
What's Good: Good coverage and indexing of popular topics like games, movies, and music. Yahoo has professional searchers out looking for the best stuff on the web, so their links are usually of high quality.
What's Not: Narrow coverage, especially if you don't want the kinds of things listed in "good stuff." More useful for entertainment than education.
Cool Feature: A lot of handy extras, like a map program (get directions) and an email/address locator (find a friend who's moved away). They also offer free email.
Search Engine GuidesSearch Engine Guide - www.searchengineguide.com
Search Engine Showdown - www.searchengineshowdown.com
Search Engine Watch - www.searchenginewatch.com
SearchIQ - www.zdnet.com/searchiq/
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