Search Engines
Search engines are computer programs that index large collections of web pages. Search engines allow you to efficiently search and retrieve files from the internet by entering your own keywords
Some popular search engines
- All the Web (opens in new window) has separate tabs for searching news, pictures, videos or audio files and a Livesearch feature which searches in real time as you type. Use Advanced Search to obtain best results.
- AltaVista (opens in new window) allows specific searches for images, news, video or audio files. It also has a tool, Babel Fish translation, to translate a block of text or a web page. Advanced Search mode enables more precise searches.
- Anzwers (opens in new window) (Yahoo! Australia and New Zealand) indexes web pages for Australia, New Zealand or worldwide. You can also search just for images, news, video or audio files or you can pose a question online and get it "answered by real people".
- Google (opens in new window) indexes web pages for Australia or worldwide. Best results are obtained in Advanced Search mode. It has many features including language translation tools.
- Google Image Search (opens in new window) indexes billions of images located on the internet. The Advanced Search option can be used to locate images of a specific file type or size and to perform complex searches.
- Google Books (opens in new window) locates books with contents that match the user’s search terms. The results provide information about the book and may include the contents page and sample pages.
- Google Scholar (opens in new window) locates scholarly literature across a range of disciplines and sources. Some material is freely available in full text format.
- HotBot (opens in new window) indexes internet pages and provides the option to search using either Ask.com or Google.
- Mamma (opens in new window) one of the oldest meta search engines on the web. Searches against a variety of major crawlers, directories and specialty search sites. Merges and ranks results.
- Bing (opens in new window) from Microsoft (beta). Searching sources include the Web, videos, maps, news, and image databases. xRank shows most popular searches.
- Scirus (opens in new window) Science-specific search engine that finds scientific, scholarly, technical and medical data from web sites and a variety of journal sources. Results ranked according to relevance
- www.tripleme.com (opens in new window) searches across Google, Yahoo and MSN Live. Searches can be restricted to Australia or Global, and duplicate results can be removed. TripleMe is a search engine of Antratel Pty Ltd (BSB: 24122328492) is a wholly Australian owned private company. Our search results are generated using proprietary computer technology for crawling and processing information from major search engines
- Vivísimo (opens in new window) uses several search engines, such as Looksmart, Open Directory, Ask, MSN & Gigablast providing the results in a clustered list of categories that may match your query more precisely.
- Web Wombat (opens in new window) has categorised index screen, for example world news, careers & education, entertainment, finance, games, lifestyle, motoring, shopping, travel, book reviews. For more precise results use the Advanced Search mode.
- Yahoo7! (opens in new window) (Australia & New Zealand) Yahoo’s searching facilities provide online internet business opportunities for Australian consumers and advertisers. This site includes News and community services, Sport and Finance Updates as well as access to various popular magazines such as Better Homes and Gardens, Marie Claire, Men’s Health plus many others.
Meta search engines allow you to search a group of search engines at the same time
- Dogpile (opens in new window)
- Ixquick (opens in new window)
- Metacrawler (opens in new window)
The Locate information through the web section of the InfoGate online module provides more information on search engines
Search engines work in a variety of ways and functions are updated regularly so read any help files or tips you see on the screens