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 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 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 (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".
- ASK.com (formerly Teoma and Ask Jeeves). Offers natural language searching. Allows concept clustering and provides a hyperlinked list of topics for narrowing or expanding search. Has an excellent relevancy ranking system called ExpertRank.
- Google 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 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 Print 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 locates scholarly literature across a range of disciplines and sources. Some material is freely available in full text format.
- HotBot indexes internet pages and provides the option to search using either Ask.com or Google.
- Mamma 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.
- MSN Search from Microsoft. Searching sources include the Web, Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia, news, and image databases. Advanced features allow specific searches for music, images, and specific file extensions such as .pdf's.
- Scirus 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
- Vivísimo uses several search engines, such as Looksmart, Wisenut, Open Directory, Ask, MSN & Gigablast providing the results in a clustered list of categories that may match your query more precisely.
- Web Wombat 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.
- Wisenut uses “LookSmart” search engine that provides relevant content, advertising and technology solutions for consumers, advertisers and publishers. It gives predominantly American content unless “Australia” is included in search fields. Use “WiseSearch” for sophisticated searching for better results that provide reliable and authoritive sites such as government departments. Refining an extensive search by using WiseGuide automatically generates categories that are semantically related to the words in your query. For very general queries or for words with multiple meanings, this feature can help you quickly find just what you're looking for
- Yahoo7! (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
The Searching the world wide web (www) section of the Introduction to the world wide web (www) 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