If you're just getting online, it's not too hard to find the search engines. If you're using Netscape (currently the most popular browser), the easiest approach: Toward the top of the screen is a series of buttons, reading from left to right: What's New - What's Cool - Handbook - Net Search. If you click on Net Search, a selection of search engines appears. Or else you can key in the URL as you would when accessing any other location.
The subject of the best search engine is often discussed among the online cognescenti, and AltaVista often gets a high number of votes. Nora Paul of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies cites AltaVista as her first choice.
On the other hand (or OTOH, as they say on the Net), Paul Kilsheimer, online reporter for the Orlando Sentinel, prefers Yahoo! "This has the most focused approach," according to Kilsheimer.
Paul agrees that Yahoo! is a good search engine, saying in an e-mail message, "Yahoo!, of course, is the greatest directory." When you search through Yahoo!, the search engine will offer you a catalog of sites. Paul also spoke highly of Infoseek.
Paul said that Search.com "is one of my favorite all-over search pages because of the database of search engines - put in what kind of thing you are looking for and it will tell you some search engines to use."
One of the major things to remember about the search engines is that it really is helpful to read the tips the companies provide on how conduct a successful search (unlike, say, trying to use the "Help" function in some word processing programs, which can actually worsen one's confusion). Many, perhaps even most, of the search engines have well-written, detailed and extremely useful guides to their own services.
Here's a list of a few major search engines, with one or two tips about each. To visit the search engine, click on the name at the beginning of each paragraph.
Yahoo! Many of the experts speak highly of Yahoo!, which they describe as a directory as well as a search engine. Example: A recent search for "Internet search engines" through AltaVista yielded two results. Yahoo! came up with 34 site matches, all of which were grouped by category, such as "Computers and Internet: Searching the Web," "Understanding WWW Search Tools," and the like.
AltaVista Many of our experts mentioned this as a favorite search engine, saying it often yields more search results than others. AltaVista's instructions for simple and advanced searches are well-written and easy to follow. An AltaVista tip: if you're searching for a phrase, like "Internet search engines," in order to get the engine to recognize those three words as an entity, enclose them in quotation marks.
Excite Both Excite and Infoseek have a feature called "more like this" which makes it possible for you to generate new queries based on documents you found when you first searched for something. This is a feature that not all search engines have.
Hotbot One of the nice things about HotBot is that you can choose among various ways to search for your document and then save the choice so your search will automatically be customized the next time you visit.
Lycos Unlike most of the other search engines, whose databases contain mostly Usenet news groups and WWW pages, the Lycos database also contains FTP and Gopher links. Lycos is also nice because it has lots of tips for searchers on how to best use the service. As of February 1979, Lycos claimed to have close to 70 million URLS in its database.
Infoseek Like Excite, Infoseek has a "more like this" feature that lets you generate new queries based on relevant documents you found during the first search. Also, like Excite, Infoseek has a "yellow pages" directory for the Web called "Big Yellow." Infoseek claimed to have over 50 million URLs in its database as of January 1997.
Magellan The Magellan folks rate the Websites in their database on a 1-4 scale for quality. The database is comprised of Webpages and classification is by subject.
Or, if you just want to check out the search engines, click on the links: