Internet Search Tools
- Northern Light --The Northern Light research engine uses patented classification intelligence and precision relevancy ranking to improve Web searching. It delivers accurate, relevant results from the Web and our Special CollectionT of over 6,900 respected full-text publications not otherwise available to Web searchers, which are organized into Custom Search FoldersT so that users don't have to waste time weeding through useless information.
- AltaVista --Searches 100 million web pages for the words that you request. It searches both the document titles and headings, as well as within the documents.
- Go--This search engine is provided by the Walt Disney Company and searches the site descriptions of available pages.
- Google -- Google crawls the Web scooping up hyperlinks and uses them to figure out how important a page is by who is using it. It draws on the Web itself to deliver more relevant answers to queries.
- Excite --Uses a combination of text and subject indices to search either by keyword or by concept. Concept searches, according to the Excite authors, find documents related to the idea of your search, and not just documents explicitly containing the search terms you enter.
- Lycos -- Offers both keyword and subject searching (the subject searches are called directory services), as well as a Point rating system which rates web pages.
- Yahoo! -- Yahoo is not a search tool, but strictly a hierarchically arranged subject index. It has developed over a long time, with lots of editorial care, so the quality is very high. Browsing Yahoo is the best way to surf for good sites when you don't know (or perhaps care) where exactly you are going.
- WebCrawler -- Does "natural language searching," so you can enter a search like "highest mountain in the world." It throws out the noise words, and does a fuzzy AND search on the others.
- Ask Jeeves --Ask Jeeves works better if you type an actual question, not just a word or phrase. Ask Jeeves uses sophisticated natural language processing to understand and match your question to an extensive knowledge base. The Ask Jeeves knowledge base consists of thousands of question templates and millions of researched answer links to web sites.
- All the Web --Search aims to index the entire web. It was the first search engine to break the 200 million web page index milestone.
- HOTBOT --Includes the ability to limit searches to Web pages that contain specific technologies such as JavaScript or Shockwave.
- LOOKSMART --Select a specific category of information or type in your query and "Search" will first find sites selected and reviewed by the Look Smart editors and then it will hunt in AltaVista's index of over 30 million web sites.
