Best Search Engines...

Many things have been going on in the world of search engines during the last year or so... Many of them have disappeared or merged with others. For example, Yahoo, which used to be a directory of web sites rather than a search engine, started using its own search technology in 2002 after purchasing other companies like AlltheWeb. One of the most popular search engines at one time, AltaVista, is now also owned by Yahoo. The three most important search engines at the moment, in terms of size and technology, are probably Google, Yahoo, and Teoma.

GOOGLE  www.google.com

According to most surveys, Google is simply the best! This search engine is simple to use and produces excellent results because of its popularity ranking system. (based on how many other sites link to a particular web page)..

Why use it? No need for complicated searching commands! Just type in a few keywords! More than often, this is the only search engine you will need! The advanced search mode lets you limit by language and fields (title,url, date, file type). Google also includes an image database, and can be used as a phonebook, a calculator, and a dictionary!

A few tips on using Google:

• To search for a phrase, enclose terms in double quotes
• Use the "ADVANCED SEARCH" screen. This is where you can include and exclude terms, and limit your search in many different ways.
• If you are looking for research materials, try limiting your search by domain .edu to retrieve only web pages from universities.
• If you are looking for images, click on "Images" and enter your keywords. If you want to limit your search by image size or file type, you can do that using the "advanced image search" mode.

YAHOO www.yahoo.com

Yahoo, mostly known as a catalog of web sites organized into categories by human editors, recently acquired AltaVista and AlltheWeb and incorporated their technology to create a powerful search engine. Like Google, it lets you limit your search by site, domain, and language (but not by date). It also has an image search feature.

The good thing is you can still use Yahoo as a directory if you want to get only a limited number of relevant sites on a particular topic. For example, if you do a search on "industrial revolution", you will get over 2,000,000 hits. But if you click on "Directory" on the top of the results page, you will then limit your results to about 40 sites. These sites have beeen evaluated by human beings and included in the directory because of their quality.

TEOMA www.teoma.com

This newer search engine tries to offer something different. Teoma uses "auto-categorization" software to analyze results. It is a hot new technology. The most interesting thing about Teoma is the way it displays your results. It offers you 3 options: your list of results, a way to refine or narrow your search, and a collection of resources on your topic. This last option includes web pages providing a collection of links, or a list of annotated web pages on your topic. It can save you a lot of time if you are doing serious research.

To learn more about search engines or just to keep up with the new ones, go to the following web sites:

Finding Information on the Internet: a Tutorial www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/FindInfo.html
This is the best of all the tutorials on the WWW!  From UC Berkeley.

Search Engine Watch  www.searchenginewatch.com
Best place to keep up with all the new developments for search engines.

This page is maintained by Helene Lafrance.   Last updated on 09/21/2004