Search Engines

If you find a page that might be useful in the future, bookmark it now or copy the entire page to your hard drive or a disk. Why? Many search engines will remove pages from their index if the page is temporarily unavailable during the search engine's index updating process. There are also a lot of web sites that shut down over night, so get the information while you can.

Some large free hosting sites are rarely indexed by all the engines: Geocities, Tripod, AngelFire, Mining Company (About.com), are examples. Geocities, for example, has at least half a million pages from people who generally do not have web sites elsewhere, so use their search tool, and you may find some interesting stuff.

Free sites, like GeoCities, will remove an entire web site if they feel it is not updated frequently enough or doesn't have enough visitors. Another reason to save the page.

It is also getting harder to submit a page to an engine because so many now want payment, and if they do have a free submission section, it can be difficult to find. For most of these engines, there is also a significant lag time getting the page into the index.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 is the only browser that will save a complete page, graphics and all. If you use another brand of browser, like Netscape, the text and graphics must be saved separately in their own subdirectories. IE 6 will create the directory for you and place everything where it belongs.

Information in databases or web sites that require pre-registration or a password to enter will stop the search engine crawlers from digging deep into the web site and will result in the failure to index those internal, hidden pages. This hidden information is called the invisible web or hidden web.

If you are doing a search and can't find what you want, try another search engine, or two or three. Some of the search engines are sharing or drawing data from some of the very large data collection services, so results may be similar.

Major Search Tools
All the web - All purpose. Excellent results. Speedy
Altavista - All purpose - can search within results to narrow the scope.
Ask jeeves - Allows you to ask a question. Undependable results.
Dejanews - Newsgroup search engine. Owned by Google.
http://live.excite.com/?cobrand=concentric/
http://galaxy.einet.net:80/
Hotbot - Seems to feature more technology links than other engines.
http://www.infoseek.com/ - Now owed by a Disney company affiliate. Used to be the fastest to index new web pages.
Google - All purpose. Favorite with medical transcriptionists.
Lycos
http://www.mckinley.com/
Metacrawler - Gets its results from other engines.
Northern Light - Seems like every time you find the ideal page, it is one of Northern Lights pages that are available for purchase only.
http://wagner.cs.colostate.edu:1969/form
Webcrawler - a nice little search engine. Has a somewhat small index.
Yahoo - Not a search engine. This is a directory where human beings review submitted URLs and then decide who will or will not be included in their index. It still is a good search tool though.

http://index.opentext.net/main/powersearch.html

Invisible Web Search Tools
http://www.fossick.com - has a search box
http://www.internets.com list of databases and data collections. Covers a wide range of topics.

FFA - free for alls
Free for alls (FFA) are simply temporary lists of links to pages. These pages of lists are not indexed by the engines partially because of the constantly changing nature of these sites. Recently, I submitted a page to one of these places and 25 minutes later was notified by the site that the link was no longer in effect. Most of these FFA sites seem to have a lot of junk advertising links. Occasionally, you will find a FFA site that focuses on a topic, but that is rare.

You probably have seen .com, .net, .edu, .org and other extensions as the end part of a web address. Sometimes people believe that anything found on an .edu or .org site is reliable. Not necessarily so. Anyone can get an .org (organization) extension. Some of the .edu (education sites) give students or staff pages, and sometimes the information on those pages is not entirely accurate. Just be careful and check who has created the page and whether they have the knowledge or authority to write about a subject.