Larger search engines
Smaller search engines, with special features
- AltaVista
http://www.altavista.com
Offers powerful advanced search options, but they can be unreliable, so examine results carefully. AltaVista's unique translation service translates pages from English to French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese; or from any of those languages into English.
Description of database
Quick searching tips
AltaVista's Advanced Text Search.
- Excite
http://excite.com/
Each item on the Excite results page includes option, "search for more documents like this one." Choose More Search to get to Advanced Web Search option, which allows searchers to require or exclude terms, change display, or filter adult content.
Description of database
Quick searching tips
- Go Network
http://www.go.com/
New home of InfoSeek, which powers this site. Useful database for company searching. Company profiles ("Company Capsule") are provided by Hoover's Online. Better-than-average help screens define terms and explain Infoseek Advanced Search options.
Description of database
Quick searching tips
http://www.google.com/
Google ranks search results by how often site is linked to by other important sites. From results page, users have option to point to live links, or to cached pages, the ones Google originally indexed. "I'm feeling lucky" search feature takes user directly to the first search result, bypassing the loading of search results page. Description of database
Quick searching tips
How to Google help screens.
- HotBot
http://hotbot.com
Offers advanced search options. Useful for finding pages containing specific media technology. Unique Word Stemming option searches for grammatic variations of search term, e.g. thought will also find think and thinking. Searchers can specify domains, domain depth, and search for links to a specific URL.
Description of database
Quick searching tips
- Lycos
http://www.lycos.com
Lycos is smaller than HotBot or AltaVista. It offers "natural language query" for searching with plain English. It also offers various word matching and word frequency options.
Description of database
Quick searching tips
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- Northern Light
http://northernlight.com
Search results include a label of either "WWW" or "Special Collection". WWW material is free, whereas Special Collection entries are only available for a fee. Northern Light organizes results from all searches into "custom search folders" e.g. by subject, type, source, or language.
Description of database
Quick searching tips
Quick Links to the best of the best
Image Search Engines
- Direct Hit
http://www.directhit.com/
A Popularity Engine, Direct Hit tracks the amount of time spent at the sites that people choose from lists of search results. Direct Hit analyzes activity of previous searchers, and thus determines site popularity and possible relevance.
- Ask Jeeves
http://www.askjeeves.com/
Allows "natural language" or plain English searching, e.g. "how much does an elephant weigh?" This site boasts greater precision than other search engines and is designed to answer the "20% of questions asked 80% of the time." Useful for finding facts.
- Goto.com
http://www.goto.com/
This site strives to make searching simple. It also provides the actual costs to advertisers for displaying their records near top of results list.
- Webcrawler
http://webcrawler.com/
Smaller than HotBot or AltaVista. Also organizes links by subject (channels).
- Search Internet.com
http://search.internet.com/
Designed for Webmasters, system administrators, IS managers and e-commerce professionals. Includes "only Web sites publishing credible, and reliable information about the Internet." Sites are selected by Internet.com editors. For advanced search options, use Power Search.
- AltaVista Photo & Media Finder
Searchable by keywords and either images, audio clips, and video files. Indexes web and private collections (e.g. Corbis). Web authors have the option of removing their pages from this database.
Maintained and updated by Charulata Chawan.
 
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