1. SEARCH
ENGINES – EX: Google/Lycos/Oingo/Direct Hit/Fast Search/Northern Light/
Good for finding
specific information. Software, (called spiders, webcrawlers, or bots)
automatically collect the words on millions of web pages. When you search, you
are not actually searching the Web, you are searching a database of words from
Web pages.
Search engines
go into their internal directory and search for keywords. No two engines
contain the same Web Pages. If you don’t find what you are looking for – it’s
time to try a different search engine.
Software
determines the order the “hits” are listed. Therefore, don’t always assume the
first-named site is the best one. Always use more than one search engine, as
most of them are incomplete.
2. METASEARCH
ENGINES - EX: Metacrawler/ ProFusion/ DogPile/ Ixquick/ SavvySearch/ Inference Find (www.infind.com/) search.com/
and 7metasearch
Metasearch
engines function differently internally. They pass the search string into a
number of search engines and give the responses from all of them. Good for
searching for unusual words, or to get an overview of a subject area.
Allow you to
look in multiple Search Tools at the same time; looks in Search Tools you may
not even know about; and teaches you new Search Tools
3. PORTALS
- EX: Yahoo/Go.com/Excite/Lycos/
Good for finding
popular information, such as sports scores, or stock quotes.
Portals are
enormous, and they try to provide such a wide variety of information and
services that they sometimes respond with too much information.
4. DIRECTORIES
AND INDEXES - EX: Yahoo/ Magellan/
Argus Clearinghouse, Librarian’s Index to the
Internet/AcademicInfo/InfoSurf/PublicLibrary/
Directories are
websites which allow you to browse the web by subject. Whereas search engines let us search using
keywords, Indexes and Directories are collections of Web Pages organized by
subject. Good for browsing for topics and finding relatively good quality
sites. They are organized by subject, and are maintained by people rather than
electronically. They have fewer web sites than search engines, but focus on
including respected sites.
An Index is
basically the same as a Directory, but the quality is usually better. The
difference is in who maintains it. In a Directory, it is anyone – whoever the
Organization hires. With an Index, you have someone who is trained in this kind
of thing. Try http://www.Lii.org, which is
the Librarian’s Index and is designed and maintained by librarians.
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