Listed below is a selection of Search Engines and Directories currently available, along with minor search tips. For a comprehensive guide to Web searching, see Search Engine Showdown. There you will find the latest information, including special features, evaluations, reviews, statistical analysis, news, and search strategies.
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With Simple Search you type keywords or phrases into Alta Vista's basic form, press the Enter key or click on the button. You can use the basic Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT, plus a NEAR directive to specify that words appear in close proximity. Insert a phrase in quotes to require that all the quoted words be directly adjacent to each other. A term prefaced with "+" must be present, and you can use "-" to filter out any results that include a term you don't want. Capitalize words to force case-sensitive searches.
Advanced Search Options requires the Boolean operators, and allows you to limit your search by date, and lets you specify criteria to use when ranking the results.. Get search results in the language of your choice with AltaVista's new language tags. Choose from 25 languages and receive search results that include only pages published in the language you specify. Simple Search Help and Advanced Search Help
HotBotSearch the main site, or use the Google Web directory, a subject directroy. Google's regular web search results are enhanced by information from the Google directory. Look for the addition of editorial descriptions and links to Google directory categories in some search returns. These additions mean that Google has found relevant information about that particular page in the directory and is bringing it to you. Click on the link to find similar pages in the same category or to find other categories like the one for your result. Includes Importance ranking and Web search integration. Google Search Tips
HotBot is composed of two separate pieces, a Web site and a Web-crawling robot. The Web site, the visible HotBot interface, responds to your searches by consulting a database, or index, of information about all the documents on the World Wide Web. "Slurp" is HotBot's Web-crawling robot. Slurp maintains the database of Web documents by continuously searching the Web for new or changed documents. It scans every single word of those documents and adds this information to the HotBot database.Query modifiers can be used to further refine all the words, any of the words, and Boolean searches. Quotation marks (" ") are used to denote exact phrases.The plus operator ( + ) placed before a word or phrase requires that all returned pages contain that search term.The minus operator ( - ) placed before a word or phrase excludes all documents containing that search term. HotBot supports Boolean searches for advanced queries. Advanced syntax guide.
Search the Web (the default), Lycos Pictures & Sounds, or the award-winning Lycos database of TOP 5% reviews. Enter keywords and Lycos returns its results ranked in order of relevance. Lycos not only provides a relevance rating (which ranges from a low of 0.0 to a high of 1.0), but it also indicates how many terms in your search expression were actually matched. This information can be helpful because Lycos, by default, searches for occurrences of any specified term, not all of them. Quotation marks (" ") are used to denote exact phrases. Use the minus (-) command in front of any word or phrase to eliminate that term. Use the plus (+) command to identify "must-have" words or phrases. Basic Help and Lycos Pro Help Guide.
"Each site in About.com is run by a professional "Guide" who builds a comprehensive environment around each of their specific topics, including the best new content, relevant links, How-To's, Forums, and answers to just about any question."
Librarians' Index to the Internet
"The mission of Librarians' Index to the Internet is to provide a well-organized point of access for reliable, trustworthy, librarian-selected Internet resources, serving California, the nation, and the world." Subscribe for free to LII New This Week, a weekly mailing of the most recent resources added to the database.
An all-around index of what's on the Web organized by category. If no matching Yahoo Categories and Sites are found, Yahoo will automatically perform a Web-wide, full-text document search using the Alta Vista search engine. If you know exactly what you're looking for or even have a general idea, try using Yahoo! search. Specify a keyword or set of keywords, and Yahoo! will search its entire database to find listings that match the keywords you provide. The search engine searches Categories, Web Sites , Net Events & Chat, and Most Recent News Articles. Help.
MetaCrawler is a World Wide search service now operated by go2net, Inc., an Internet content and technology company. MetaCrawler gives a single box for entering the search statement. MetaCrawler relies on the databases of various Web-based sources. MetaCrawler sends your queries to several Web search engines, including Lycos, Infoseek, WebCrawler, Excite, AltaVista, and Yahoo. Then MetaCrawler organizes the results into a uniform format. MetaCrawler gives these options for AND, OR, and phrase searching. Two different ways of searching MetaCrawler are offered: fast search and power search. The fast search brings some results up more quickly, while the power search takes longer but results in more hits. When you specify a search, list groups of words that must occur together by surrounding them in quotes. Also, specify words or phrases that must appear in documents by prefixing them with a plus sign, and specify words or phrases that must not appear by prefixing them with a minus sign. There should be no space between a + or - sign and the word to which it applies. There should be a space between individual query terms. In addition to the basic "any words", "all words", and "as a phrase" options, MetaCrawler recognizes a special search syntax that allows you to describe your desired results very specifically. Help.
Search.com provides a single query box, a default operation of AND, and an option for a phrase search. The default search is one going to multiple search engines. Other meta searches available from Search.com include Guides, News, Shareware, Usenet, numerous specialty groups, and shopping searches. The Search.com Guide which is interconnected with the specialty search categories is a version of the Open Directory.
The News search (provided by Yahoo!) offers up to the minute news from thousands of news sources all across the globe, with hundreds of stories indexed every minute.
"all the News on the Net, all the Time."
