Search Engines
Herein lies a list of all the Search Engines which have been brought to my
attention, along with any relevant comments. They do not appear in any sort
of order, and where available/appropriate, a search form/utility has been
imported onto this page itself, for your convenience.
The two symbols below are used by each link. Clicking on the left hand one
(the boxed link) will take you to the destination site, bringing the page up
in the main frame here, but retaining the contents bar on the left, while
the other one (the free'n'easy link) will take you directly to the
destination.
Yahoo
Webcrawler
Excite
Alta-Vista
Yahoo is among the most popular search engines on the web, and offers
several services (including stock quotes, and news) besides the normal
web-search itself. The insert below will function as a basic web-search, for
more information or any of the other services, visit yahoo themselves. The
information available via Yahoo is also navigatable by 'categories', which
makes it very easy to find a large number of sites on a particular topic.
Webcrawler uses a similar idea to Yahoo's 'categories', but calls them
'channels' and offers far more integrated information. Using webcrawler is
far similar to leafing through a magazine which has sections on particular
topics than using a search engine such as Yahoo - this has its upsides,
particularly when you are casually browsing rather than looking for specific
things. It also offers a 'web search' form like Yahoo.
Excite seems at first glance to look very much like Yahoo, but also shares
features with Webcrawler (for instance its use of 'channels'). When browsing
through the categories rather than simply searching, you are presented with
a lesser bulk of information than with Yahoo, but, the information seems to
be presented in a more polished form, and seems more conservative on
graphics and such than Webcrawler (leading to slightly faster loading
pages). Excite also offer news, stock quotes and a few other services, along
with a free web-based email account.
Alta-Vista is a fairly impressive search engine, from Digital, which is
literally that - a search engine. It doesn't offer any of the utilities that
many other sites have (for instance, stock quotes), nor does it have a
'categorical' interface, or 'channels' for you to browse through. However,
it does offer searches limited to either the WWW, or Usenet, in a language
of your choice (or any language), and has a very neat and clean user
interface, which is simple to use.
