WWW Search for general Web Site searching.
www.allthesites.com is a new and extremely fast search engine, check it out!
Some other commom search sites.
Just select the search engine you want to search from
(on the right), and type in what you are searching for.
People Search for searching Name databases.
This utility uses the www.four11.com name database.
Business Finders Just like the Yellow Pages.
| BigBook | SwitchBoard |
| InfoSpace | World Pages |
| Yahoo! Business | Zip2 |
Usenet Search for searching News Group Postings.
| Deja News | Altavista | HotBot |
A small, but powerful list of usenet engines.
Meta Search query many search engines with one query.
| Metacrawler | Mamma |
| Ask Jeeves | Dog Pile |
| Cyber 411 | HighWay 61 |
Help
Searching the Internet for specific information can be a daunting task.
With several million WWW and FTP sites to look through it can take a
user several hours to find a specific piece of information. The various
Search Engines above provide a means for the user to query the Internet
easily and quickly for the desired information with a high probability of
finding your request.
The Search Engines are always scouring the Internet looking for web pages, FTP files and other information which they then catalog in a database for retrieval. The user simply provides the "keywords" which she is looking for and the Search Engine looks for these "keywords" in its database. The web pages which contain these "keywords" are returned back to the user (hits) in the form of a list of links usually with some descriptive narrative. The user then simply reads through the list, examining the narrative until she finds a likely "hit" then jumps to that site and looks for her information. The "keywords" which you provide to the Search Engine are critical in determining the nature and number of "hits". You should try to provide as concise a list of "keywords" as possible to narrow down the search and return the fewest number of hits. Too broad of a list of "keywords" results in a list of too many links to examine. The more powerful Search Engines deliver your results alphabetically sorted or sorted by % accuracy (how many keywords were in the hit) or by a user defined arrangement.
Most Search Engines provide a means to further define your search using boolean operators such as "AND", "OR" and "NOT" or Date ranging. This way you could construct a more effective search such as "dogs AND doberman AND sale AND pedigree NOT cat NOT cats" which would likely remove such places as pet shops from your list of hits if you were looking for pedigree dobermans for sale. You generally find the syntax of such "Power Search" capabilities for each Search Engine under "Power Search" or "Advanced Search", study your search engine and use these operators, they can really help find your data quickly.
Metasearch Engines allow one to submit a single query which is then sent to several different Search Engines with the results tabulated and returned. This way one can thouroughly scour the Web with a single search. Meta Engines are usually a bit slower than other search engines because of this.
The more popular Search Engines like Yahoo! return information which attempts to direct the user onto Yahoo! content prior to directing them to content on the Web. Advertisers pay these type Search Engine Sites to preferentially display their information first and many pay extra to have their link displayed as the first in the list rather than alphabetically. Users tend to utilize Yahoo! mainly due to the advertising of the brand name, Yahoo! is simply better known than HotBot and gets more usage (hits) because of this. Advertisers know this and are willing to spend the money to advertise with them. Many of the more popular search sites are evolving into what are known as "Portal Sites". They offer many services such as e-mail, Web Chat and copious amounts of content to draw users onto their site and keep them there, displaying advertising on virtually every page. Power users prefer to use the Search Engines which do not attempt to deliver information in this manner. Search Engines such as HotBot and Allthesites provide the experienced user with much faster and more concise search results and are consistantly better rated than Engines like Yahoo! and Webcrawler.
Back To Top
© 2000 CS&T Inc.
Phone: (307)-877-6612
Email Site Comments to: webmaster@hamsfork.net
Email Support and Admin Questions to: admin@hamsfork.net