What Search Engine is good for You? - Computers - http://maxpages.com/nanotechnology/Search

Anyone who's ever fired up a Web browser knows the name Yahoo! Its reputation as a means to find your way around the back alleys of the information Superhighway is legendary Ask around and any number of people will tell you: "Yahoo! is my favourite search engine." But is it really?

The thing is Yahoo! is not a search engine. It's actually search directory. To explain: A search directory is a handmade affair-it is created by industrious geeks who find and categorise sites manually. the folks at Yahoo!, it can be surmised, must have done their job exceedingly well.

A search engine, such as Alta Vista, uses computerised "spiders" or "bots" to roam the web, from site to site, collecting information. Some spiders trawl indiscriminately; others concentrate their efforts on the more popular sites.

To review all the major websites here they are:

HotBot (by Hot Wired)
http://hotbot.com

Powerful and simple, HotBot has a user friendly interface with pull-down menus for the Boolean "or" "and" formats used by most engines. Modify searches is easy, as are th help pages which walk you through the steps of a search. Hotbot intelligently rates its results by relevancy, and it will also search based on when pages were last modified.

Altavista (by Digital)
http://altavista.digital.com

Second only to HotBot in retrieval speed, Altavista offers keyword searches in either simple or advanced format. Perhaps to offset its sometimes complex approach to searching, AltaVista now has an optional "topic map". This allows you to view a flow chart of results and click on related keywords that better define your search. You can link from the search result keywords directly to sites. A Web index and newsgroups are updated in real time.

Lycos (by Carnegie Mellon University)
www.lycos.com

Flexible and easy to use, Lycos enables you to find exact matches or to use stemming, which would find "build", "builder" and "buildings" if you seach for "build". Lycos will also retrieve only pages that contain your search term a specific number of times. After a search you can click a "Get more on" button to prompt Lycos to find relevant images, audio clips or other multimedia itmes. Another button finds Lyco's "Top 5%" sites related to your search topic.

Infoseek (by Infoseek Corporation)
www.infoseek.com

Despite its size (claims 50 million pages indexed), Infoseek does a better job than most of removing defunct pages. Like HotBot, you can search within previous search results. It also offers access to further data via a related topics list. You can search for a word in a URL. Plain language queries are also supported. For example, you can ask it: "What are the lyrics of Waltzing Matilda?"

Excite (by Excite)
www.excite.com

Excite is easy to use and can be customised based on chosen subjects of interest. After searching, a "More Like This" button will find additional similar sites. Search lists and be sorted by Web stie, which offsets the tendency for search engines to return multiple pages from the same site.

WebCrawler (by Excite)
www.webcrawler.com

WebCrawler's robot will search the Web fro anything, using either keywords or broad category headings. Keyword searches come back with 10, 25, or 100 sites per page rated on relevance to your keywords. Summaries are an option and tips on effective searching and customising results are straightfoward.

Yahoo! (by Yahoo!)
www.yahoo.com

Subject heading or keyword searches have been Yahoo!'s strength since the service began. It has, however, added numerous extras, including lates news headlines, sports scores and stock quotes. There's also a "random" option to cater to your surfing freedom and general curiosity.

LookSmart (by Reader's Digest)
http://looksmart.com

LookSmart's search facility is userfriendly and operates using categories. A "favourites" section can be localised to your area. LookSmart was the brainchild of two Australian intent on improving methods of searching the Web, with financial backing coming from Reader's Digest.

Nothern Light (by Nothern Light Technology)
www.nothernlight.com

Nothern Light has a unique search categorisation capability that will search the Web, a specail collection of newspaper and magazine articles, or both. The search results page features a column with customised folers organized so that can narrow your search instead of wading through thousands of links.

Excerted from:

Home Office Computing (CurtCo FREEDOM Group)
www.hoc.smalloffice.com from all editions, 1999-2000

PC Computing November 1997 Copyright

Fortune December 7th, 8th 1998 Copyright

CommuniQue March 1998 edition Issue 89 Copyright.

Chris Yurko from Home Office magazine

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Page Updated Wed Jun 6, 2001 5:25pm EDT