Search Engines

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Search Engines

Sooner or later you will want to find out if there are any pages on the WWW on a topic of your interest. The tool to use is called a search engine. You usually start these engines by typing in keywords. There is a great variety in how these search engines index pages. The most sophisticated ones make use of keywords in the so-called meta-statements in the header of the HTML of the page. The less sophisticated scan the body of the page for particular recurring words. How do you know which search engine to use? If you are totally new to search engines and do not want to do much reading about individual ones, a good place to start is:

Eureka Top Ranked Search Engines

This search engine provides a simple, consistent interface to each search engine. A detailed description and minireview of most search engines is also included.

List of Search Engines

Generally speaking, one can discern between two types of search engines, single and multiple search engines. The multiple search engines usually search many single search engines at a time. It is difficult to say what are the best search engines, as this varies over time, with fashion and per person. Currently, one of the most popular ones is Google (see below). Some search engines are linked.

AltaVista (auto-redirects to regional sites: e.g. AU, DK, FR, NL, SE, UK, US, & others)
AOL
ChemIndustry
CNET Search
DogPile
Excite (Regional Sites: AU, CA, DE, FR, NL, UK, & others)
Euroseek
Galaxy
Go (Infoseek)
Google
GoTo
Hotbot
Lycos (Regional Sites: DE, FR, NL, UK, US, & others)
Magellan
MetaCrawler
Northern Light
Starting Point
SuperCrawler
WebCrawler
Yahoo (Regional Sites: AU, CA, DE, FR, SE, UK, & others)

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