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 HPL Home |
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| General
Purpose Search Engines All support + and - in front of terms, and phrase searching (Exceptions are noted) |
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AltaVista's
General Search interface. Visit the AltaVista
Help page.
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AltaVista
Advanced works with Boolean searches, that is, searches using the words
AND, OR, NEAR and AND NOT for searches that involve more than one keyword. |
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Accepts
natural language queries. In fact, Ask Jeeves was one of the first to feature
the natural language search as its main query method.
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Excite
has become yet another portal, offerring news, email, a directory and all
the rest, at the expense of their once unique and useful search engine.
Searches the web, or images, or the Excite Directory depending on which
you select.
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Google
sorts your hits based on the how popular they are -- in other words, the
greater the number of other sites pointing to any particular document
in your results list, the closer to the top of the list it is placed.
Google assumes an AND search if more than one term is supplied. As with
any AND search, the more terms you supply the narrower, more specific
your search. Visit Google's
help page.
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Fast,
form-based searching for several words; a phrase; a person's name. They've
recently added Boolean search capability.
HotBot's SuperSearch allows you to specify limiters for a more focused
search.
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One
of the first search engines on the 'Net. Searching for audio, video, and
pictures is possible. Lycos Advanced Search allows the use of + and - but you cannot use the AND/OR operators. For more details see the Lycos Advanced Help page.
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Quick
and easy searches; a good starting place. Supports natural language searching.
Multiple terms are searched using OR logic but results that contain all
of the words you entered are given a higher relevance score so they appear
at the top of the list.
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The
famous Yahoo Catalog of the Internet. This is not officially a Search
Engine but more like a web-based library of pages. |
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| Meta (Multiple) Search Engines | ||||
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The
About network consists of hundreds of Guide sites neatly organized into
23 channels. The sites cover more than 50,000 subjects with over 1 million
links to the best resources on the Net and the fastest-growing archive of
high quality original content. Each site in the network is run by a professional Guide who is carefully screened and trained by About. Guides build a comprehensive environment around each of their specific topics, including the best new content, relevant links, How-To's, Forums, and answers to just about any question. |
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Another
of the multi-search engine portals. It searches several of the better known
sites simultaneously. There is a Power
Search available. View Metacrawler's
Help FAQ.
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This multi-search engine allows searching Usenet Newsgroups in addition to the WWW and is different in other ways as well. From the homepage: “This is an index of sites, not pages. It is very good at finding companies and organizations by purpose, product, subject matter or location. However, it is not designed to find esoteric information on individual Web pages. Instead, this engine attempts to focus on the quality of answers, not the quantity.” Read the Dogpile Help page for more. |
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| Special Purpose Search Engines | |
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This is a special site where you may look up terms, abbreviations, and technical topics. In content it's rather like an online version of David Macaulay's wonderful book The way things work. |
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Internet
Movie Database Search for a movie and reviews, etc., by Title, Person name, Keyword, etc. Vote on your favorite movies. Has links to other movie rating sites. |
| Yellow Pages | Go to our Reference Links page to see our selection of the many Internet based Yellow Pages directories available to you. |
Search Engine Help
 Information
About Searching the Internet
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This
section will help you search the Internet more effectively. Rather than
trying to cover here what others have already done so well, we would refer
you to the Search Engine Watch site (below) and to the online Help
available on each engine's homepage. Unfortunately, searching the Internet
has not yet become standardized. To some extent, every Search Engine uses
its own interpretation of the term or terms you provide. But there are
many similarities, especially in the selection offered above. |
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| Search Engine Watch |
This
is one of the best, and most interesting, sites on the Internet dealing
exclusively with Search Engines. It contains various rankings and
comparisons of several popular engines, how the engines get their
information and determine relevancy, and details about how to submit your
query. |
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Glossary
(Words that appear frequently in discussions about searching) |
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| search engine | An Internet resident software program that provides a way to search for the location of documents containing a term or terms you supply. |
| Boolean search | A multiple-word search in which the words are connected using "AND/OR" logic. Two words connected by AND used in a search box require that both words be present in the document sought. A search in which words are connected with OR requires only one of the words to be present in a document. It is a much broader search than the AND search. |
| hit | A document that meets the criteria specified in your query. |
| keyword | A word or term that is important, or key, in describing the topic you seek |
| limiter | A condition that limits the range of a search. Some sites (see HotBot's SuperSearch, for example) allow you to restrict your search to documents that have a creation date within a certain range. Others allow you to limit your search to the title of the document. It is a way to control the amount of information retrieved. |
| match any terms | Implies an OR search, for example, Ireland OR Eire |
| match all terms | Implies an AND search, for example, apple AND Cortland |
| meta search engine | An engine that customizes your query for several search engines and submits it to them individually. It then combines the results, eliminates duplicates, ranks them for relevancy, and presents the result. |
| natural
language search |
A search where you supply a phrase or question as though it were spoken, for example, "information about summer study in Paris." Many search engines have greatly improved their handling of this type of query. |
| near |
A
few search engines allow you to specify how close, in words, two keywords
must be before a document containing them counts as a hit. The default
closeness varies with the engine, or is customizable on several, but for
Alta Vista it is 10 words. |
| operator | A word or symbol used to join two or more keywords together in a query. The word "AND" is an operator, as is the plus sign |
| phrase searching | A search for two or more words in a particular order, for example, "apple dumplings" Most engines support this type of quoted search although Hotbot, for one, makes you select it through menus. Use double quotes to enclose the phrase. |
| query |
The
words you supplied and the way you connect them constitute a query, for
example |
| relevancy (ranking) | A measurement of how significant the word(s) are that you supplied in terms of the overall content of the particular page in which it is found. Some engines rank your search terms against its occurence in all the pages they "know about." |
| wildcard search | Most
engines allow you to end a search term with a special character, often an
asterisk, to indicate that you will accept variations in its spelling. For
example, using the term Alask* will find Alaska, Alaska's, Alaskan,
Alaskana, etc. The asterisk is called a wildcard—it can take many
identities. Note that this method is sometimes called stemming or truncation. You should usually combine the wildcard search term with at least one other term or the result may contain too many hits to be useful. |
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Last
Updated July 23, 2002 |
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