Life Beyond Google

Life Beyond Google? Internet Searches Some suggested Search Engines, Directories, and MetaCrawlers: There are basically three types of search engines. Those that are powered by robots called crawlers; ants or spiders and those that are powered by human submissions and those that are a hybrid of the two. A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system, such as on the World Wide Web. A search engine is a web site that lists other web sites so that they can be searched either by category or keyword. The search engine allows one to ask for content meeting specific criteria and retrieves a list of items that match those criteria. This list is often sorted by relevance. The databases used by search engines are made by "robots" or "spiders" that automatically map the Web by following the links between sites. Typically, a search engine works by sending out a spider to fetch as many documents as possible. Another program, called an indexer, then reads these documents and creates an index based on the words contained in each document. Each search engine uses a proprietary algorithm to create its indices such that, ideally, only meaningful results are returned for each query. ` Directories contain sites that are hand-picked by human beings. Still, most search sites present search engine as well as directory results. Human-powered search engines rely on humans to submit information that is subsequently indexed and catalogued. Only information that is submitted is put into the index. Metasearch engines gather results from several search engine lists and directories. They are not that good as advanced Boolean searching, but may provide you with a broad sweep of the Web. Crawler-based search engines are those that use automated software agents (called crawlers) that visit a website, read the information on the actual site, read the site's Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects to performing indexing on all linked websites as well. The crawler returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. The crawler will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the administrators of the search engine. 2 Search Engines Google www.google.com Voted four times Most Outstanding Search Engine by Search Engine Watch. Google has a well-deserved reputation as the top choice for those searching the web. The crawlerbased service provides both comprehensive coverage of the web along with great relevancy. It's highly recommended as a first stop in your hunt for whatever you are looking for. Google is always a good bet, since it has the largest index. AllTheWeb.com www.alltheweb.com Search engine which indexes web pages, as well as multimedia, audio, FTP, PDF, and MS Word files from around the world .Powered by Yahoo, you may find AllTheWeb a lighter, more customizable and pleasant "pure search" experience than you get at Yahoo itself. The focus is on web search, but news, picture, video, MP3 and FTP search are also offered.AllTheWeb.com was previously owned by a company called FAST and used as a showcase for that company's web search technology. That's why you sometimes may sometimes hear AllTheWeb.com also referred to as FAST or FAST Search. However, the search engine was purchased by search provider Overture (see below) in late April 2003, then later become Yahoo's property when Yahoo bought Overture. It no longer has a connection with FAST. AOL Search www.search.aol.com/(external) AOL Search provides users with editorial listings that come Google's crawlerbased index. Indeed, the same search on Google and AOL Search will come up with very similar matches. So, why would you use AOL Search? Primarily because you are an AOL user. AltaVista www.altavista.com AltaVista opened in December 1995 and for several years was the "Google" of its day, in terms of providing relevant results and having a loyal group of users that loved the service. 3 Excite www.excite.com Excite results are dominated by paid listings from Overture, with non-paid results from Inktomi. Before Dec. 2001, Excite was a crawler-based search engine that gathered its own results. Excite was originally launched in late 1995. It grew quickly in prominence and consumed two of its competitors, Magellan in July 1996, and WebCrawler in November 1996. Magellan was discontinued in April 2001. WebCrawler continues to operate as a separate service, but it provides the same results at the Excite.com site itself. Gigablast www.gigablast.com Compared to Google, Yahoo or even Teoma, Gigablast has a tiny index of the web. However, the service is constantly gaining new and interesting features. Give it a whirl, if you want to try something experimental yet dependable. Live Search www.live.com/ MSN Search, designed to compete with the industry leaders Google and Yahoo. The search engine offers some innovative features, such as the ability to view additional search results on the same web page (instead of needing to click through to subsequent search result pages) and the ability to adjust the amount of information displayed for each search-result (i.e. just the title, a short summary, or a longer Live Search (formerly Windows Live Search) is the name of Microsoft's web search engine, successor to summaryMSN (Live) Search is getting better and may provide results if the other two don't work. Lycos www.lycos.com Lycos is one of the oldest search engines on the web, launched in 1994. It ceased crawling the web for its own listings in April 1999 and instead provides access to humanpowered results from LookSmart for popular queries and crawler-based results from Yahoo for others. Mamma www.mamma.com 4 SearchKing www.searchking.com A searchable directory of web sites that offers instant indexing of submitted web sites. Nettrekker www.nettrekker.com An award-winning academic search engine that’s fast and easy to use for students,teachers, and parents Web(Subject) Directories About.com www.about.com About.com, formerly the Mining Company, features hundreds of "guides" offering original content in various areas. While About.com isn't really a search service, the guides do have extensive links to other sites -- not to mention top-notch content of their own. Yahoo www.dir.yahoo.com Launched in 1994, Yahoo is the web's oldest "directory," a place where human editors organize web sites into categories. However, in October 2002, Yahoo made a giant shift to crawler-based listings for its main results. These came from Google until February 2004. Now, Yahoo uses its own search technology. In addition to excellent search results, you can use tabs above the search box on the Yahoo home page to seek images, Yellow Page listings or use Yahoo's excellent shopping search engine.. The Yahoo Directory still survives. You'll notice "category" links below some of the sites lists in response to a keyword search. When offered, these will take you to a list of web sites that have been reviewed and approved by a human editor. 5 Yahooligin.com www.yahooligin.com Yahooligans! (for Kids) A browsable, searchable directory of Internet sites for kids. An experienced educator to ensure the content has carefully checked each site and links are appropriate for kids aged In addition to the directory, it also has a number of fun features, including a Hypersite, a Joke of the Day, a Cool page, and much News. LookSmart www.looksmart.com LookSmart is primarily a human-compiled directory of web sites. It gathers its listings in two ways. Commercial sites pay to be listed in its commercial categories, making the service very much like an electronic "Yellow Pages." However, volunteer editors at the LookSmart-owned Zeal directory also catalog sites into non-commercial categories for free. Though Zeal is a separate web site, its listings are integrated into LookSmart's results. The real gem at LookSmart can be found via its Articles tab. That provides access to content from thousands of periodicals Open Directory www.dmoz.org The Open Directory uses volunteer editors to catalog the web. Formerly known as NewHoo, it was launched in June 1998. It was acquired by AOL Time Warner-owned Netscape in November 1998, and the company pledged that anyone would be able to use information from the directory through an open license arrangement. Librarian's Index http://lii.org Librarians' Internet Index (LII) is a publicly-funded website and weekly newsletter serving California, the nation, and the world.You can also search and browse our website for the best of the Web. We have over 20,000 entries, also maintained by our librarians and organized into 14 main topics and nearly 300 related topics.Websites you can trust.! 6 EINET.net http://www.einet.net Only eiNET.net utilizes a team of skilled Internet Librarians® to scour the Web, locating and categorizing quality content for placement in their applicable categories, resulting in a large breadth of topics and an impressive depth of content within the directory. Employing this process, eiNET.net has grown to one of the Web's largest directories, containing nearly 2,000,000 listings across nearly 700,000 categories. Ask www.ask.com Ask Jeeves initially gained fame in 1998 and 1999 as being the "natural language" search engine that let you search by asking questions and responded with what seemed to be the right answer to everything. In reality, technology wasn't what made Ask Jeeves perform so well. Behind the scenes, the company at one point had about 100 editors who monitored search logs. They then went out onto the web and located what seemed to be the best sites to match the most popular queries. Today, Ask depends on crawler-based technology to provide results to its users. These results come from the Teoma algorithm, now known as ExpertRank. ASK for kids www.askforkids.com Lets you ask a question the way you'd ask it in the real world, then searches the Internet for the answer. This site is specially designed for kids. 7 Meta-Search Engines Unlike search engines, metacrawlers don't crawl the web themselves to build listings. Instead, they allow searches to be sent to several search engines all at once. The results are then blended together onto one page. Clusty www.clusty.com Currently searches a number of free search engines and directories, NOT Google or Yahoo Dogpile www.dogpile.com Searches Google, Yahoo, Looksmart, Ask.com,MSN search and more. Sites that have purchased ranking and inclusion are blended in. HotBot www.hotbot.com HotBot provides easy access to the web's three major crawler-based search engines: Yahoo, Google and Teoma, It's a fast, easy way to get different web search "opinions" in one place. Hobot debuted in May 1996, it gained a strong following among serious searchers for the quality and comprehensiveness of its crawler-based results, which were provided by Inktomi, at the time. Info.com www.info.com Info.com provides results from 14 search engines and pay-per-click directories, including Google, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, Kanoodle, LookSmart, About, Overture and Open Directory. Also offers shopping, news, eBay, audio and video search, as well as a number of other interesting features. InfoGrid www.infogrid.com In a compact format, InfoGrid provides direct links to major search sites and topical web sites in different categories. Meta search and news searching is also offered. 8 iZito www.izito.com iZito is a meta search engine with a clever feature. Click on any listing you are interested in using the P icon next to the listing title. That "parks" the listing into your to do list. Click on the P tab, and you can see all the pages you've culled. It's an easy, handy way to make a custom result set. Also interesting is the ability to show listings in up to three columns across the screen, letting you see more results at once. Jux2 www.jux2.com/ This search result comparison tool is cool. It allows you to search two major search engines at the same time, then see results that are found on both first, followed by results found on only one of them next. The small overlap visual tool displayed is great. I used to make examples like this to explain search engine overlap and why one search engine may not cover everything Meceoo www.meceoo.com Meta search with the ability to create an "exclusion list" to block pages from particular web sites being included. For example, want to meta search only against .org sites? French version also offered. MetaCrawler www.metacrawler.com One of the oldest meta search services, MetaCrawler began in July 1995 at the University of Washington. MetaCrawler was purchased by InfoSpace, an online content provider, in Feb. 97. Surfwax http://surfwax.com A better then average set of search engine. Can mix with educational , US Gov. Tools, and news sources 9 WebCrawler www.webcrawler.com webCrawler is essentially a copy of the Excite service, above. WebCrawler was originally a completely independent service, opened to the public on April 20, 1994. It was started as a research project at the University of Washington. America Online purchased it in March 1995 and was the online service's preferred search engine until Nov. 1996. That was when Excite, a WebCrawler competitor, acquired the service. Other Sites Search Engine Watch: Search Links www.searchenginewatch.com/links In case you are entering the Search Engine Watch site via this page, the URL above will take you the home page of our guide to search engines across the web. Direct Search www.freepint.com/gary/direct.htm A large collection of specialized search tools that often contain info that is hidden to search engines. Lovingly compiled by search expert Gary Price. SearchEngineGuide: Search Engine Directory http://www.searchengineguide.com/searchengines.html AllSearchEngines.com www.allsearchengines.com The name says it all -- links to all search engines, or at least a whole lot! Browse categories to find search engines, don't search. Searching simply brings back general results from a paid listings search engine. Big Search Engine Index www.search-engine-index.co.uk Hundreds of search engines organized into categories. 10 SearchBug.com www.searchbug.com Collection of search and reference sites, ranging from reverse phone number searches to package tracking, as well as covering the major search engines. Formerly called Search-It-All. Refdesk.com A very thorough and well organized site of research and reference links. Teoma.com Goes beyond traditional page ranking methods to determine authority, in addition to relevancy. To determine the authority or quality of a site's content, Teoma uses Subject-Specific Popularity. Subject-Specific Popularity ranks a site based on the number of same-subject pages that reference it, not just general popularity, to determine a site's level of authority. Britannica.com www.britannica.com Links to top web sites and content from the Encyclopedia Britannica, in one place. 11 Evaluating web pages skillfully requires you to do two things at once: 1.Train your eye and your fingers to employ a series of techniques that help you quickly find what you need to know about web pages; 2.Train your mind to think critically, even suspiciously, by asking a series of questions that will help you decide how much a web page is to be trusted. Techniques for Web Evaluation : 1. Before you leave the list of search results -- before you click and get interested in anything written on the page -- glean all you can from the URLs of each page. 2. Then choose pages most likely to be reliable and authentic. Is it somebody's personal page? Read the URL carefully: o o Look for a personal name (e.g., jbarker or barker) following a tilde ( ~ ), a percent sign ( % ), or or the words "users," "members," or "people." Is the server a commercial ISP or other provider of web page hosting (like aol.com or geocities.com What type of domain does it come from ? (educational, nonprofit, commercial, government, etc.) Is the domain extension appropriate for the content? Government sites: look for .gov, .mil Educational sites: look for .edu Nonprofit organizations: look for .org (though this is no longer restricted to nonprofits) Many country codes, such as .us, .uk. and .de, are no longer tightly controlled and may be misused. Look at the country code, but also use the techniques in sections 2 and 4 below to see who published the web page.