- Run by Digital
Equipment Corporation
- Simple search does
text search
- Most comprehensive
- Advanced search
uses Boolean Operators
- Advanced search can
limit search by date
- Advanced search can
prioritize results
- Does not rank
sites, just looks for text
- Searches by text
- Offers "Query
by Example", which allows you to search for similar
pages,
without requiring you to redefine search
- Quite basic and
simple to use
- Opening screen asks
you to search by either "keyword" or
"concept",
but both give you similar, if not the exact same result
- Does not allow you
to change original query from the results page
- Instead, you must
click on "Refine Search"
- Ranks sites from
0-100%, but it is often an inaccurate measurement
- Free search engine
- Paid service called
Infoseek Professional
- Offers categorized
site reviews
- Searches by text
- Has similar pages
option
- Uses Boolean
Operators
- Sometimes gives you
inaccurate results
- Instead of using *
as the symbol for wildcard, the $ symbol is used
- Text search, as
well as index search
- Able to find more
pages than Excite or Infoseek, but still falls behind
AltaVista
- Highlights
occurrences of keywords in the results page
- "Stems"
words, meaning a search for "paper" will also
search for
"papers"
- Allows for
exclusion of certain pages that have a specified keyword
- Does not allow user
to specify a required keyword to be present
- You can't match
complete phrases
- Incapable of
Boolean searches
- AOL's search engine
- Very simple
interface (good for beginners)
- Boolean Operators
can be used
- Quotation marks can
be used to denote a sequence of words
- Does not have a lot
of sites under its search functions,
making it less effective
- Usually gives you
few matches
- It's actually a
searchable index
- Relies on real
people to visit sites and summarize them and
categorize them
- Simple enough for
beginners
- When you search,
you can search for a word in the category title, or
in its site summary
- Very easy to locate
similar sites
- Results page
highlights the best sites, and puts them at the top of
the list
- By cataloging the
web, the results aren't as broad
- Doesn't allow for
text search in the contents of the page, so keywords
must be in the summary or category name
- It does have
"Open-text" function which performs text
searches,
but isn't very good
Special Thanks to PC
Magazine for the information presented above
