Numerous Internet search engines exist to aid in your navigation of the World Wide Web. While many mirror each other in content, each has its own unique method of indexing, searching and presenting web-based information to the user. The following are descriptions of some of the more popular Internet search engines and directories that will assist your search of the more than one billion indexable pages on the web.

Before beginning it is important to explain the difference between search engines and directories. They are often confused with one another. Search engines, also called "spiders" or "crawlers", constantly visit or crawl from website to website on the Internet to create catalogs of web pages. Since they run automatically and index so many web pages, search engines may often find information not listed in directories. Humans,  on the other hand, create directories. Sites must be submitted then they are assigned to an appropriate category or categories. Because of the human role, directories can often provide better results than search engines. Yahoo is perhaps the best known example of a directory.

ALTAVISTA

www.altavista.com

AltaVista has more than 17 billion words from more than 350 million web pages. You may spend more time looking through the results of an AltaVista search than you will at other search engine sites, but when you want to find as much as you can on a single topic, AltaVista is a good place to look. AltaVista’s search engine does not support stemming or truncation – for example, "post*" would retrieve words like postage, postal, etc. - so all AltaVista searches are performed only on the exact phrase and not on the plural or other forms of the word. A PowerSearch option makes it possible to refine a query. You can create a query using the operators and, or, not or near.

AltaVista continues to increase the languages it supports with Russian being the most recent language added in Spring 2000. AltaVista has also launched a search-only site called Raging Search (www.ragingsearch.com). RagingSearch allows users to customize results in several ways such as to see up to 50 listings at a time, to display a more compact format, to filter out adult content and to set language preferences. When searching for paired terms, use closed quotation marks, "Australian parliament" or a plus sign (+) to connect the word, Australian+parliament.

ASKJEEVES

www.askjeeves.com

AskJeeves was the first search engine to allow a free text question to be asked in plain English when it debuted in 1997. AskJeeves will serve up suggested web pages in response to your query. What is not known to the uninformed searcher is that the search engine actually picks keywords from your question and searches those words only but not necessarily as paired terms. AskJeeves acts as a web scavenger. If the question you posed does not have an answer in Jeeves’ own databank, he submits the query to five top search engines automatically and displays the best answers from each. Just don’t ask Jeeves what time dinner is served - he hates that!



DIRECT HIT

www.directhit.com

Are you frustrated when you get back thousands of irrelevant responses to your search on the web? Direct Hit, owned by AskJeeves, examines the queries made by people using a variety of search engines and the responses they chose to see thus making it a "popularity engine". Thus, when you do a search on Direct Hit with the same query, the sites you get back first are the ones others selected most often.  

DOGPILE

www.dogpile.com

A popular metacrawler which, unlike search engines, does not crawl the web to build search results. Instead, Dogpile allows searches to be sent to several search engines all at once then the returned results are blended together on one page. The default for all searches is Web Metasearch. Your search results are sent back to you indicating how many documents were found per search engine. 


EXCITE

www.excite.com

With more than 50 million web pages, Excite provides the fullest range of services of all web search sites. While its keyword search engine is most prominent, the site offers a daily news summary, opinion columns, cartoons and reviews of web sites written by a team of journalists. Excite does not attempt to collect all the pages on the web, rather it creates an estimate of the most popular sites by looking at links on sites known to be popular. To find pages that are not yet popular, its spider is sent to a number of "What’s New" sites. Once the weekly compilation of URLs is made, another spider is sent to bring back the contents of the pages. The entire database is then replaced. Excite does a fairly good job at keeping current. Excite is frustrating to users trying to pinpoint specific information. Only simple phrases can be searched and no Boolean operators are supported. Although Excite offers two ways of searching - via keyword or concept - it is difficult to see the differences between these two methods. When you are interested in a mainstream topic that is widely discussed, Excite is likely to find the right information and fast. Excite was launched in late 1995 and grew quickly in popularity, enough son that it was able to consume two of its competitors, Magellan in July 1996 and WebCrawler in November 1996.

Search for paired terms in quotes, "European pharmaceutical industry".

FAST SEARCH

www.alltheweb.com

Formerly called ALL The Web, Fast Search has a simple philosophy – Be thorough and quick. FAST has indexed more than 300 million web pages. Like Google, (www.google.com) FAST starts off with a simple homepage with only a search term entry box. You have the option of looking for any word you enter, all the words or the exact phrase. Fast Search also offers MP3 and image searching. 


Not only is FAST big but it is quick. It was designed to return accurate results faster than any other search engine using a complicated "organic" search that involves multiple queries looking at multiple indices at once. You even receive a statement telling you how long your search took as in .853 seconds. Give it a try if you need something quickly and do not wish to wade through many irrelevant web pages. 


GOOGLE

www.google.com

As of July 2000, Google claims to be the world’s largest search engine accessing more than one billion urls. A search-only site (no advertising), Google analyzes all of the links it finds on web pages for relevance to a particular subject. For example, on a search for information on Queen Elizabeth, Google will find as many "Queen Elizabeth" sites as it can. It will then look to see which of these sites has the most links pointing to it. The more links a site has from other pages, the higher Google ranks it. Unlike many other search engines, Google does not have much on its homepage other than a box for search terms. You get two buttons: "Google Search" and "I’m Feeling Lucky". Using the first button will get you a list of search results. The second whimsical button will take you immediately to the first web site that Google finds. Google’s new search index is also the largest collection of international web sites. It’s ability to allow searching in 10 different languages will soon expand to include Asian languages.

HOTBOT

www.hotbot.com

Launched in May 1996 as WIRED magazine’s entry into the search engine market. Lycos purchased WIRED in October 1998 and continues to run HotBot as a separate search service. The site is powered by Inktomi and Direct Hit search engines and is extremely comprehensive, fast, and customizable. If you can tolerate the bright lime green screen you will discover that HotBot searches the full-text of more than 100 million documents, finds all documents that fit your criteria, sorts them according to their relevance, and returns a list of documents in the form of abstracts and hyperlinks. By default, HotBot displays documents containing all the words in the search terms you specify, including "and", so take care in phrasing your search. By setting the main pop-up box to "any of the words", you will find documents that contain as few as one of your requested words, similar to saying "or". However, the latter will increase the number of documents returned and decrease the relevancy. The "best" search strategy is to search for paired words or phrases by placing your search terms in quotes, as in "General Motors".


GO/INFOSEEK

www.go.com

Go is a portal site jointly produced by Infoseek and Disney. It offers portal features such as personalization and free email plus the searching  capabilities of the former Infoseek search engine which has now been folded into Go. Thanks to its ESP search algorithm, Go consistently provides quality results in response to search queries. Many experienced web searchers agree that Go has one of the smartest search tools on the web. While it does not yield the largest number of results, it does consistently find relevant, human-compiled web sites. It also has an amazing capability to process plain English questions in lieu of keywords. Go was officially launched in January 1999. It is not related to GoTo.com.

Search using closed quotes to obtain paired terms, "Mercedes Benz" or "Daimler Benz". A plus (+) sign can be used to find more than one word in a document but not necessarily next to one another, i.e. +ruby+slippers.


LOOKSMART

www.looksmart.com

LookSmart purports to be a breakthrough next-generation, consumer-oriented navigation service launched by the publishers of Reader’s Digest in October 1996. Reader’s Digest backed the engine for about a year then company executives bought back control of the service. It is the closest rival that Yahoo has in terms of a human-compiled directory. This site classifies itself as a Personal Search Engine as it is designed to respond to a user profile. LookSmart has eliminated the cumbersome process of scrolling through thousands of unrelated web sites and replaced it with a simple point-and-click approach. Three search tools are employed: Explore helps the user pinpoint web sites tailored to personal interest; LookSmart Search powered by Inktomi and Personalize LookSmart which allows the user choose favorite shopping, entertainment, and news source sites.

LookSmart draws on a team of dozens of editorial experts who have built a highly relevant base of more than 300,000 sites from the millions of  sites that clutter the web thereby saving the user from having to sort through irrelevant or offensive sites. LookSmart staff members also review all web sites within its database to assure that they are "family" safe. LookSmart provides directory results to MSN Search, Excite and many other partners.

For people who prefer using keywords, LookSmart does have a refined search option. Specifically, someone doing a search for "fish" will receive a contextual response helping the user to find web sites for "fishing industry", "fish recipes", and "fishing equipment". 


LOKACE

www.lokace.com

Launched in February 1996, Lokace was the first all-French language search engine on the Internet. Search terms can be entered in English or French. If an English language word is used then you will retrieve homepages with English language titles but the content may be in French. Similarly, when a French language word is used you will retrieve sites written in French. Lokace also provides users with a free email service. 


LYCOS

www.lycos.com

Lycos, one of the oldest web search engines began in May 1994. Lycos delivers the most comprehensive results much like AltaVista. The Lycos database is not based on the full-text of each page. Rather, it creates abstracts of pages based mainly on headers, titles, links, and the first few words of key paragraphs - all of which are designed to maximize broadly relevant information. Lycos is tops at finding homepages with your search term(s) in the title of the homepage. With Lycos you can use and as an operator. However, not cannot be used. Instead you must use a minus sign (or hyphen) before a search term and Lycos will decrease the relevancy of the term. For example, auto+industry-sales-advertisements will retrieve homepages about the auto industry supposedly without the sales advertising information. In  October 1998, Lycos acquired HotBot search service which it continues to run separately.


NORTHERN LIGHT

www.northernlight.com

Introduced in August 1997, Northern Light features an ability to classify documents by topic which it hopes distinguishes it from some of the other search services. Northern Light has made a special effort to eliminate duplications and dead links so it should provide excellent results when used as a search engine. Northern Light also has a set of "special collection" documents that are not readily accessible to search engine spiders. These include documents from an online library of more than 12 million full-text articles from newswires, magazines and databases. Searching these documents is free but there is a charge of up to US$4.00 to view them.

To search for paired terms place terms between quotes, "chocolate cake". A plus sign (+) can be used to indicate that words must be present and a minus sign (-) to exclude words. Thus, +recipes for +"chocolate cake"-nuts will retrieve recipes for chocolate cake without nuts. 


YAHOO

www.yahoo.com

Yahoo is fun and easy to use and is the web’s most popular search service. The secret to Yahoo’s success is its staff of 150 editors who categorize the web. Yahoo offers a browsable, hierarchical, subject arrangement of the database starting with broad categories such as Art, Computers, Entertainment, News, etc. Yahoo was one of the first Internet search aids to partner with Netscape which accounts for its popularity. Beginning in July 2000, Yahoo supplements its results with those from Google. If a search fails to find a match in Yahoo’s own listings, then matches from Google are displayed. However, performance is sometimes poor and results are frustrating because it is not always obvious that what was retrieved is what you were searching. With yahoo your search term(s) may be buried 10+ levels or pages down within a web site. 

Yahoo is the acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle. The key is to remember that Yahoo is a website directory and not a search engine. As such, it may not have some sites in its catalog that a web crawler or spider might find searching the web each day. If a search in Yahoo does not turn up any useful links, users may wish to continue by using a search engine. Because so many people use Yahoo, search engines listed first on Yahoo pages have a strategic advantage over others.

Page developed by:
Jerry W. Mansfield, IFLA/GIOPS Secretary
Congressional Research Service Library
E-mail: jerryusps@yahoo.com

Please send comments and suggestions about these pages to Jane M. Wu, GIOPS Information Coordinator at jane.wu@fao.org. We welcome suggestions for inclusion on this list.

Latest Revision: 20 July 2000