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Search Engines

Note: There are many different search tools available for seeking information on the World Wide Web. You should be aware that if you do not find relevant information using one tool that does not mean the information does not exist. An identical search using different search tools will almost always yield different results.

Altavista
Altavista is a powerful search engine set up by the Digital Equipment Corporation. Users are able to search the Web or Usenet and control the format of the response (standard, compact, detailed). More complex searches are also available using advanced query syntax. Altavista claims to have 16 million webpages and 13,000 news groups in its index and more than 8 billion words.

C | Net Meta-Search Site
SEARCH.COM is a collection of tools designed to find all kinds of information...from World Wide Web sites to phone numbers to movies to stock quotes, and all points between. Includes feature stories to help you find what you're looking for, searching tutorial help, reliability ratings for each site, a chance to vote on your favorite site (or one that you hate), and a whole lot more.

Google
Google is a search engine that makes heavy use of link popularity as a primary way to rank web sites. This can be especially helpful in finding good sites in response to general searches such as "cars" and "travel," because users across the web have in essence voted for good sites by linking to them.

Hotbot
Advertised as the most complete web index online, HotBot is a high-performance, fully-automated Internet search engine --- a fast, accurate tool to find information on the vast and ever-growing Internet. Hotbot uses parallel, network of workstations technology to download over 10 million web pages a day, from around the world.

InfoSeek
Infoseek allows users to search for web sites, email addresses, Usenet newsgroups, news, and web faqs. The service also includes a subject-oriented directory that allows users to browse different sites.

Lycos
Lycos is one of the oldest search engines on the Internet. Special feature include the capability to search for pictures or sounds, top news, site reviews, sites by subject, city guide and road maps.

Meta-Crawler
The MetaCrawler differs from other search services in that it doesn't maintain any internal database. Rather, it relies on the databases of Open Text, Lycos, and others. The MetaCrawler sends your queries to nine different services: Open Text, Lycos, WebCrawler, InfoSeek, Excite, Inktomi, Alta Vista, Yahoo, and Galaxy. Allows users to specify what geographic region to search and includes an option for a fast search or a comprehensive search.

Search US Government Servers
Search U.S. Government Information Servers using the U.S. Business Advisor govbot database. You can also search view a list of predefined searches by category .

StreetEye - A Wall Street Search Engine
StreetEye is a tool for searching Wall Street Internet resources. The index and search engine provide comprehensive access to all resources of interest to investors and investment professionals. Types of information include news, market data, brokers, exchanges, banks, investment managers and more.

Webcrawler
Webcrawler is an easy-to-use search engine for researching topics on the Internet. Users simply enter a keyword(s) and the service will return a list of web sites that contain the word. Good for a broad topic search, however, it is difficult to narrow one's search using Webcrawler.

Yahoo!
One of the first sites that provided a means to search for information on the web, Yahoo! is an excellent place to begin your research. You can either browse by subject categories or search by keywords.

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Last revised:  February 28,  2001
Send questions or comments to Rod Bustos