Web Searching
Search Engines
Metasearch Engines
Directories
Citing and Evaluating Web Pages
Getting the Most Out of Search Engines
Google
- Voted "Most Outstanding Search Engine" four times by Search Engine Watch readers.
- Uses "crawlers" to find new web content.
- Searches can be limited to "Images", "Groups", "News", "Froogle" (shopping), "Local" or "Scholar" from the main page.
- "Advanced Search" feature allows searching for an exact phrase, exclusion of terms, or limiting results by date modified.
Yahoo!
- Combines search engine and directory by showing relevant directory categories within search results.
- Uses "crawlers" to find new web content.
- Searches can be limited to images, video, audio, directory, local, news, or shopping.
- No advanced search feature.
Ask.com
- Uses Teoma search technology to deliver relevant results; features many specialized search options like maps, movies, weather, conversions, and zip codes
- Search for videos or pictures by typing "videos of..." or "pictures of..." (also works for "gifts for...")
alltheweb.com
- Powered by Yahoo!
- Offers easily customizable preferences, including Boolean searching, highlighting search terms, number of search results per page, language, and "skins".
- Searches can be limited to news, pictures, video, or audio.
HotBot
- Allows you to run a
search in HotBot, Google or Ask.com.
- Offers advanced searching options in both Google and Ask.com.
- Contains several "skins"
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Dogpile
- Searches Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com.
- Can be limited to images, audio, video, news, yellow pages, or white pages.
- Search results tell which search engine or engines returned the result.
Vivisimo
- Searches Looksmart, Lycos, Ask.com, Open Directory, MSN, and Wisenut.
- Clusters results into groups of similar results to help narrow down queries.
- Search results tell which search engine or engines returned the result.
Mamma
- Searches many search engines and directories, including Looksmart, Yahoo!, Gigablast, Wisenut, Ask.com, EntireWeb, and Open Directory.
- One of the first metasearch engines to appear on the World Wide Web.
Kartoo
- Searches Voila, Alltheweb, Altavista, MSN, Yahoo!, Wisenut, HotBot, Lycos, EntireWeb, ToileQuebec, Open Directory, Teoma, and Looksmart.
- Provides a net of search results broken down by topic and interconnected by keywords.
- Offers screen shots of resulting web sites.
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Directories offer a selection of websites chosen for their quality.
Librarian's Index to the Internet
- a directory of web resources selected and evaluated by librarians.
Open Directory
- "an extremely successful Web directory" (PC Magazine 11/15/2000); 4 million links as of 9/2004.
Infomine
- a librarian-built directory of websites appropriate for university-level research.
Galaxy
- "the oldest searchable internet directory", employs professional librarians as editors.
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Citing and Evaluating Web Pages
Citing Web pages
Evaluating Web sites
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Getting the Most Out of Search Engines
Tips for improving your search results (from Search Engine Watch)
Confused about Web terms?
Look at our glossary!
Learn more about the Web!
Read Chapter Six of our online tutorial,
Finding It! A Research Skills Tutorial.
Have a question about searching
the web?
Contact the Reference Librarians
Questions or Comments about this site?
Contact the page author: Amy Harris
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Amy Harris
