Search Engines

Look at SFF-NET (including author home pages).

In no particular order...

	The Big Hub Megasearch engine.
	Beaucoup Meta/parallel search, plus categorized list.
	Ask Jeeves Natural language searching, meta/parallel searches. Seldom comes up with useful links.
	The justly famous Yahoo index. Not a search engine so much as a library listing, maintained by humans.
	Perhaps the broadest search engine/index is Lycos. It has the top page per site, rather than every page, however.
	If you want depth, try Alta Vista. Various translation services are available here too. Be advised that the nice folks from Double-Click (the ones who read your cookies and tell advertisers where you've been) hang out here.
	One that claims to be more complete than any other search engine is Excite. How true this is I don't know.
	One of my personal favorites, and one where I often search first, is Google.
	For another search engine, and a different method of presentation, look at the Webcrawler. Webcrawler and Excite seem to be the same people wearing different hats.
	Search the Usenet at DejaNews. They've become advertising-driven, and it's somewhat difficult to find useful content amid the ads. You should also be aware that the terms and conditions they've placed on messages posted through them give them rights to your words that most people don't want to give away. Still, if you want to search Usenet, there's nothing like it.
	What had been a pretty good search engine at Infoseek sold to Disney, became Go.com, and turned into yet another list of advertising categories with a search engine hidden somewhere on the page. I may de-list this one on the next revision.
	Dogpile is a metasearch site, doing parallel searches on a number of search engines at once.
	Northern Light arranges search results into folders, keeping similar results together. This makes separating the wheat from the chaff a bit easier. They claim to have the largest database and the fewest dead links.
	HotBot claims to be the most comprehensive and most current index. Seems to be part of Lycos.
	Savvy Search is a metaseach engine that covers the major search engines and guides.
	Need a phone number? Switchboard is the place.
	All-In-One is a list of 500 search engines and indexes, arranged in categorized lists.
	EZ-Find at the River allows you to search several of the biggest search engines, one at a time, without retyping between them.
	Search.com performs a parallel search on around 700 search engines.
	Another place to check is Starting Point with a search engine plus categorized hotlists. "Everything you need to work the web. Every day."

To the Doyle & Macdonald Home Page.
URL http://www.sff.net/people/DoyleMacdonald/search.htm

Page last modified on Monday February 04 2002

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