Web Search Engines

AltaVista
Click here to visit AltaVista

• Run by Digital Equipment
• 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

Excite
Click here to visit Excite

• 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

Infoseek
Click here to visit Infoseek

• 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

Lycos
Click here to visit Lycos

• 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 occurences 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

WebCrawler
Click here to visit WebCrawler

• 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

Yahoo!
Click here to visit Yahoo!

• 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

Copyright © 1996 Julianne , Anthony , Brandon . All rights reserved. Revised: August 14, 1996.

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Special Thanks to PC Magazine for the information presented above