Search

Engines

A List of Common and Special Search Engines:

The Danish Alta Vista	The Danish version of the Alta Vista. (Explan. of robot).
Alta Vista	The US version of the search engine (robot) - still the very best in my opinion.
All the Web
AOL NetFind Kids Only	From AOL, contains links to sites that are safe for kids.
Ask Jeeves - and know where to get the info	Ask Jeeves is a service where you enter a question, and Ask Jeeves tries to point you to the right web page that provides an answer. If Ask Jeeves cannot answer a question, it pulls results from various search engines in its metacrawler mode.  (Explanation of MetaCrawler).
Ask Jeeves For Kids	Especially for kids.
Compuserve
Det offentlige	Danish search engine searching for pages in the public sector. In Danish only.
Dogpile	The search engine for finding  search engines.
Excite
FindArticles.com	Not an ordinary search engine - this one finds articles in various magazines on the Internet.
Galaxy
Geocities
Google	Search engine. Robot.
Google - in Danish	The search engine Google in Danish. Robot.
GoGuardian	Provides filtered results at the Go Network (Infoseek).
Overture	The former GoTo search engine.
HotBot
The Internet Archive	Archive of old homepages.  "Surf the web as it was".
InfoSeek / Go
Jubii	The Danish search engine Jubii. Index.
KidsClick!	Backed by librarians, KidsClick lists about 5,000 web sites in various categories.  Index.
Kvasir	The Danish search engine Kvasir by Scandinavia Online. Robot.
Lycos	Web index.
LyricCrawler.com	Music search engine.
Maggellan	McKinley's Internet directory. (Explanation of directory)
Metacrawler	Meta service searching several WWW-databases.
Microsoft Network
Midi Explorer	Search engine for midi music files.
Netcenter
NorthernLight.com
GO Eureka	Australian search engine.
Sympatico	Canadian search engine.
Point	The best of the web.
Seven Wonders of the Web	Special index: Spotlighting new & original sites.
Snap
Thor	The Danish search engine Thor driven by Alta Vista. Robot.
Vivísimo	A new and different search engine. Sorting results in a new way. (Organized search results with document clustering.)...  Try it out!
Yahoo	Well known search engine. Web index.
Yahoo Canada	Canadian edition of the famous web index.
Yahoo! UK & Ireland	British & Irish edition of the famous web index.
Yahoo Australia	Australian edition of the famous web index.
Yahooligans	Yahoo for kids, designed for ages 7 to 12. Sites are hand-picked to be appropriate for children. On-line games, etc. Web index.

Search Engine
The general word for the web tools that help you find the desired pages on the World Wide Web. The search engine is most often a robot, an index (directory), or a metacrawler (a metacrawler is not a real search engine). All search engines need in some way or another to become aware of the existence of a home page.

Robot
Once the robot has been notified of the Internet address (URL) of your homepage - it will scan the Internet once in a while to see whether pages have been changed, new links and subpages have been added, etc. This function is sometimes called "a spider" (it crawls along the various links of your homepage and registers them). The Alta Vista is a good example of a search engine called a robot. See "Search Engine Watch" for a more detailed explanation.
(URL = "Uniform Resource Location" - the exact location or address on the Internet of a homepage).

Index (Web Index)
- or "directory" is a database of  homepages or websites. (A website is something considered larger than a home page - consisting of more than one or many pages). The information has been evaluated and typed into the database manually by a person/librarian. If changes are required you will need to write to the search engine's staff and ask for the changes. The Danish "Jubii" is an example of an index.

Metacrawler
Unlike the real search engines, metacrawlers don't crawl the web themselves to build listings. Instead, they resend your search to several search engines at the same time. The results are then blended together onto one page.

Search Operators
to be used with search engines such as the Alta Vista (and many others) for an effective search:

Operators	Explanation	Example
+	Finds only documents on the WWW that contain this word. Especially necessary when the search contains more words.	+musical +london
-	Excludes documents in the search result containing this word.	+musical +london -cats
*	A so-called wildcard. May be used after 3 characters to substitute up to 5 characters. Can be used to search for both the British and the American way of spelling, f. ex. "aluminium" (Am. spelling "aluminum"). Or to find both the singular and the plural  - or any other up to 5 different characters. (F. ex. +germ* will search for German, Germans, Germany, and any other up to 5 letter suffixes. Also "germs" which may not have been the intention. The solution could be to add: -germ -germs in the search box.	+ alumin*m +musical* +germ*
" "	Finds documents including exactly this phrase or the included words in the exact same order. Use the "+" operator as well to be sure the phrase is included in the search result.	+musical* +london +"phantom of the opera"
All characters written in the search boxes should be written in  lower case characters. A search for "london" will result in listings of web pages containing "London" and "london" - whereas a search for "London" will result in pages containing only "London". There will always be creators of home pages who have spelled london with a lower case "l". The use of upper case characters will narrow your search unnecessarily. Some search engines are not sophisticated enough to handle  searches with search operators. The method is often connected to robots. (Advanced users often prefer these). Other search engines offer the possibility to make the same choices in roll down menus. (Talking about "All of the words" - and "All of the words in the exact order", etc. - which ought to be equivalent to using the search operators + and  " "). The "advanced search" mode (selected from the search engine's main page) offers further possibilities for specific and accurate searching. Read about these in the search engine's help option.  (More about advanced use of search engines at Search Engine Watch). If you are using the same search engine often you should read the "help" information of the specific engine to benefit fully. However, the "simple search" mode will cover most searches if you use it intelligently with the appropriate search operators.

Comments to: Niels Quist