WWW: Beyond the Basics

15. Searching and Databases on the Web

15.6. How to Select a Search System?

15.6.1 Search systems on the Web

There are many popular search systems available on the World Wide Web. Here we introduce some search systems for the Web.


  1. LYCOS: A great search tool. It includes both subject and word searches. It also provides service of e-mail address search and Road Map.

  2. YAHOO
    : A easy search tool. This is a very good place to start for the beginner. This pioneering Web guide is now integrated with Alta Vista's search engine. It is updated daily for collecting Web information. It supports keyword search, substring or all keys (boolean) as well as complete word searches.

  3. INFOSEEK
    : A powerful but expensive search tool. Users can search the entire Web or Usenet newsgroups for words and phrase.

  4. WEBCRAWLER
    : A popular and fast search tool. It has a "natural language" search engine with an index that is updated daily, including WebCrawler Select sit reviews.

  5. ALTA Vista
    : One of the best search tools. It uses Digital Unix, Digital Alpha and AltaVista search software (AltaVista search engine). Alta Vista indexes more than 8 billion words from 30 million Web pages found on 275,600 servers, and 4 million articles from 14,000 Usenet newsgroups. Users can search a friend on the Web.

  6. EXCITE
    : Twice the power of the competition. Excite's "concept-based" search technology, called Spider, summarizes information on 50 million Web pages. Users can search the whole Web or sites reviewed by Excite.

  7. Electric Library
    : Research vs. Net Search. It is searchable database of 800 full-text magazines, 150 full-text newpapers, and thousands of books and over 28,000 photos, TV & Radio transcripts, maps. Electric Library supports plain English searches, for use by students and families.

  8. Magellan
    : Database Search tool.

  9. Open Text Index
    : Search for words.

  10. IBM
    : Category search tools and links.
  11. HotBot.
    Search the entire web with 54 million documents. HotBot is the first site to use multimachine parallel computing for Internet searching.
  12. Starting Point.
    Perform medasearch. Search via ideas instead of words.
  13. Global Search. These tools will conduct a Web-wide search for a single word.

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Copyright © 1996 Aixiang (I Song) Yao, All Rights Reserved

Aixiang (I Song) Yao<ayao@csgrad.cs.vt.edu>;
Last modified: November 21, 1996