Search engines - which are best and how to use them

~terry Sun, Sep 22, 1996 (09:21) seed

Searching the web with Altavista, WebTaxi, yahoo, Galaxy, or whatever search engine you choose can be both fascinating and frustrating. It helps to know how to narrow and refine your search or you'll spend all day wading through tens of thousands of responses.

~terry Sun, Sep 22, 1996 (09:22) #1

I love http://www.webtaxi.com. Check it out!

~tedchong Tue, Dec 10, 1996 (00:29) #2

I use www.altavista.digital.com everyday, the good thing is it can find lots more info that are not available from other search engines.

~terry Tue, Dec 10, 1996 (00:55) #3

I user altavista 90% of the time, occasionally I like yahoo for its organization.

~sunspot Tue, Dec 10, 1996 (11:19) #4

anyone tried savvy search? check it out

~arch1234 Wed, Dec 11, 1996 (00:32) #5

I find www.infoseek.com the best search engine.It gives me all information which I wanted.It is precise and you can get to-the-point information.My second favourite site is www.altavista.com.But I usually use infoseek.com

~terry Wed, Dec 11, 1996 (07:53) #6

I'll have to take infoseek for a run!

~tedchong Fri, Dec 13, 1996 (08:45) #7

Here are the search engines in my Netscape' bookmark:" http://www.altavista.digital.com/ http://www.metacrawler.com/ http://www.lycos.com/ http://metasearch.com/ http://www.search.com/ http://webcrawler.com/ http://www.yahoo.com/ http://www.stpt.com/

~terry Sun, Dec 15, 1996 (00:04) #8

You can see an example of freeWAIS-sf based searches at: http://www.genmagic.com/search.html http://www.macworld.com/search/search.html http://www.ragan.com/pubs/search.html Macworld and Ragan also use Yapp.

~terry Sun, Dec 14, 1997 (22:40) #9

Reviews search engines: http://www.searchenginewatch.com/ Cool!!!

~terry Mon, Jan 26, 1998 (18:03) #10

Exsqueeze me if you're reading this twice! (put it in the wrong topic the first time). www.searchenginewatch.com is a Meckler Publishing site that evaluates search engines.

~KitchenManager Wed, Feb 11, 1998 (01:09) #11

http://www.linksxtexas.com/ is the search engine for Texas Monthly. Stuck the spring, here, in it the other day...

~terry Sun, Aug 30, 1998 (16:22) #12

What do y'all think of these sites: http://www.jailbabes.com/white/aw28490.html and there's also http://www.womenbehindbars.com/

~MarciaH Fri, Oct 8, 1999 (17:47) #13

http://www.altavista.com is still the best search engine out there - and has the benefit of an image search (which is where a lot of those goodies I download for Geo and for Drool celebrations originate.) http://www.google.com is another new and very good one.

~terry Sat, Oct 9, 1999 (11:22) #14

google rocks. Also, not strictly a search engine, but http://www.refdesk.com is great launching pad for finding things.

~Irishprincess Sat, Oct 9, 1999 (12:38) #15

I use www.goto.com most often--I just found some really useful stuff for a class of mine in which I'm studying Byron (you probably all know that by now,) but sometimes you get some really strange stuff, too.

~terry Mon, Oct 11, 1999 (01:00) #16

For random searching, there's http://www.etour.com. I like http://www.google.com 's "I feel lucky" option, it's amazing how often it comes through.

~sociolingo Sat, Oct 16, 1999 (10:52) #17

I use the multiengine http://www.dogpile.com a lot. It searches about 15 engines for the same query.

~aschuth Mon, Oct 18, 1999 (13:08) #18

My fave is Hotbot's Super Search - the best filters I ever found! Plus it shows a hundred hits a time ( http://www.hotbot.com/?MT=&SM=MC&DV=0&LG=any&DC=10&DE=2&_v=2&OPs=MDRTP&act.super.x=59&act.super.y=8 ). You can search by geographical areas, domain-extensions (.edu, .com), whole websites (!!!) like this here...

~MarciaH Mon, Oct 18, 1999 (15:37) #19

Is that the one you used to find out if I was a real person or not? Not all search engines carry my little article...!

~aschuth Thu, Oct 21, 1999 (12:32) #20

Would be either that, or Goto.com. I don't use anything else, unless I keep getting 0 hits. Then I pop over to Yahoo!, and check if there's a category for what I look for. If all fails, I'll go Boolean on Altavista (expert search mode - I love the proximity switch you can set there - haven't used it in three years, though).

~MarciaH Thu, Oct 21, 1999 (13:00) #21

The only search engine I could find me on was Yahoo. I generally go Altavista first since I can do image searches so easily, then go to Metacrawler and Webcrawler which gives you far more (25) URLs at a time than the others do. And one of them gives you the top 10 entries from several engines...but not always the ones for which you are looking. Too narrow!

~aschuth Mon, Oct 25, 1999 (16:28) #22

Hotbot gives a top 10 AND returns 100 (THAT'S ONE HUNDRED!!!) hits, with description + URL. AND! you can go "search only a certain website", or "hits must contain a certain file type, e.g. gif". That's cool if you look e.g. for some images of a certain artist, or topic.

~MarciaH Mon, Oct 25, 1999 (16:56) #23

This is true - particularly helpful if you are searching for information on a current personality or event - it saves you from having to sift through old material.

~terry Tue, Oct 26, 1999 (10:21) #24

I find lots of my spring posts when I search for Walhus on any of the engines. This site gets searched heavily by most of the big ones.

~aschuth Thu, Oct 28, 1999 (14:35) #25

Found only 16 hits through Hotbot using my name, though. Not that I mind not being found easily...

~terry Fri, Oct 29, 1999 (14:36) #26

Try using http://www.egosurf.com and see what your name turns up. Does it have any of your spring postings?

~MarciaH Fri, Oct 29, 1999 (15:00) #27

I am about to test your new search engine for me, but I did find my post in Drool / Olivier listed. That is odd because I have posted so many more places than that and have a conference full of my posts. It is most capricious the way it picks and chooses. It does not bother me to be found easily, either...I am just curious how it decides which of my many MANY posts to list. I'll report back on egosurf!

~sociolingo Fri, Oct 29, 1999 (15:08) #28

I tried it on the phrase search and it looks like it may be helpful.. it turned up a couple of papers I haven't found elsewhere. It'll be interesting to see what it turns up in the next week and posts to me.

~MarciaH Fri, Oct 29, 1999 (15:12) #29

I did Hotbot, Google, and Egosearch. None of them had ever heard of me, but neither had Hotbot heard of Alexander Schuth. What am I doing wrong?

~terry Fri, Oct 29, 1999 (21:24) #30

Submit the url of one of your posts to them and try them in a few weeks.

~MarciaH Fri, Oct 29, 1999 (22:30) #31

ok, I will...I am in telnet via my just installed crt. The print is tiny, but I think I can fix that.

~terry Sat, Oct 30, 1999 (05:18) #32

Yeah, crt is very cool. Be sure to set your buffer size to 9999 so you can scroll back through your session. You can set the character size and stretch out the window so you can have more rows. Right now I'm using 49 fows and 80 columns in VT100 mode. You can set up an automatic login if you want, as well.

~MarciaH Thu, May 25, 2000 (14:54) #33

northernlight.com is new and interesting. It finds obscure and archived articles about the person / topic in which you are interested and posts a brief bit of it. You then have the option of purchasing the entire article (usually about $2.75 US with the $5.00 free to new users.) I have done such and was pleased. You also have the option of not purchasing it if you read it and find it is not what you thought it would be - something I have also done. It is not the search engine Google.com is, but it is a good companion for Google. http://northernlight.com/

~MarciaH Thu, May 25, 2000 (15:09) #34

Did all of that CRT modifying stuff you mentioned, thanks! It sure is involved getting into Spring via telnet from Hawaii-on-Line. Wish there were an easily-used bookmark system. Each time I do it I have to wander around looking for which part of Lynx will get me here. Tried Gopher and Archie and got tired of waiting to connect to whatever.edu for the latter. I need to do more practicing and taking notes...

~MarciaH Thu, May 25, 2000 (15:17) #35

I got no response to submitting my urls to Google or northernlight, but when I submitted MarciaH it came up with 63 hits from 36 sources (including the copy of your telnet session which you post on index - northernlight - not all of which were pertaining to me) and 333 from Google which actually were! Yesterday it was 405 hits. Hmmm...

~MarciaH Thu, May 25, 2000 (15:33) #36

altavista.com could find only 6 places... So much for my former favorite search engine. Times have changed and it has not.

~sprin5 Tue, Mar 13, 2001 (13:05) #37

http://www.indexdata.dk/zap/ An Apache module that lets you provide a search interface to any library collection that makes their bibliographic data available via the Z39.50 standard. Collections such as the Library of Congress, Bell Labs/Lucent, or MIT can be searched directly from your web site with this module. The Library of Congress provides their own gateway to what looks like a couple hundred different collections: http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/gateway.html

~mikeg Tue, Mar 27, 2001 (13:42) #38

cool stuff...

~terry Mon, Apr 30, 2001 (02:15) #39

http://www.google.com is putting karenr's site at the top of their list.

~mikeg Thu, May 3, 2001 (09:12) #40

just checked it out...she appears to be no. 2 now. still, a great achievement :-)

~mikeg Thu, May 3, 2001 (09:13) #41

although a link to spring.net somewhere on the page wouldn't go amiss....

~terry Fri, Nov 30, 2001 (09:55) #42

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html I may try to use internetseer to monitor my sites, since it's free. Unless they bog you down with free offers.

~terry Tue, Jan 1, 2002 (01:48) #43

http://www.searchtools.com/robots/

~MarciaH Tue, Jan 1, 2002 (20:06) #44

Hmmm. I will add that to my arsenel. Nice Lights, Terry!

~cfadm Thu, Apr 28, 2005 (08:32) #45

Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2005 14:34:11 -0700 From: AllinOne Webmaster To: terry@www.spring.net Subject: Re: search page (resending) First let me apologize for my blank email yesterday! Here is the email I was trying to send you. I noticed your search related info on your page http://www.spring.net/yapp-bin/public/read/web/8 I was hoping you would consider mentioning our search engine too. It has been gaining a lot of popularity lately. I think our new "grouping" feature makes finding what you want VERY easy. I was hoping you might try it and if you like it you might mention our search engine on your site too. Our search engine is at http://all4one.searchallinone.com PS. Please drop me a note and let me know what you think. :-) Thanks in Advance, James http://searchallinone.com Seems like a decent search engine. Kind of like http://dogpile.com. Want to have some fun? Try http://www.dogpile.com/info.dogpl/searchspy/results.htm?filter=1 and you'll get to see, in real time, what folks are searching. It's like a stock ticker for searches.

~WERoland Sat, Oct 8, 2005 (08:30) #46

Here's a cool little search engine I found while doing some editing at the ODP... http://www.bananaslug.com/

~terry Sun, Oct 9, 2005 (13:36) #47

Try sports calendar with world cities. It gave me an awesome result. banana slug rocks.

~terry Thu, Dec 8, 2005 (00:19) #48

great graphical representation of the top search engines. http://www.search-this.com/search_engine_decoder.asp

~WERoland Sun, Mar 26, 2006 (19:34) #49

Dear Valued Zealots and Contributors, Thank you for being a part of the Zeal community and contributing your time and knowledge to the Directory. After trying to put the deserved resources behind Zeal, we have made the conscious decision to shut down Zeal.com. On March 28, 2006 Zeal will no longer be available. We are not selling Zeal.com and have no future plans for it at this time. We think that avid Zeal users will appreciate the large, interesting and vital community at Furl.net (www.furl.net). Furl is an online book marking service that helps you save information that�s important to you, share it with others and see what others are saving and find important. With Furl you can: - Save Web pages to a personal, permanent archive with 5GB of storage - Revisit the full text of your favorite Web pages - Share articles and information with friends and family members with simple email pass-along tools - Use Furl as a platform for social networking and discovering useful information - Share articles and information with people that share common interests using RSS feeds - See what other Furl members are saving and sharing - Save your favorite Zeal content Whether you are browsing the Web, travel planning, recipe sharing, house hunting or researching, Furl is a wonderful tool. Join the thousands of people that are using Furl every day to find, save and share information that is important to them.

~terry Mon, Mar 27, 2006 (15:25) #50

Furl is in the same league as http://delicious.com which is an amazing bookmarking website. While at http://sxsw I noticed that the http://pluck.com had developed a competitor to delicious which will import delicious bookmarks. If you use http://mozilla.com 's Firefox, there's an excellent delicious plug in and I'm sure there are plugins for furl.

~WERoland Sat, Apr 8, 2006 (18:39) #51

Here's a cool little one being developed right here in Austin... http://www.iboogie.com/

~WERoland Sat, Apr 8, 2006 (18:48) #52

~weroland Sun, Apr 9, 2006 (12:21) #53

http://www.kosmix.com/

~MarciaH Sun, Apr 9, 2006 (15:13) #54

Good heavens - this is still decorated for Christmas a few years ago. Hmmm I wonder who did that? (S)He left the lights on !

~WERoland Sun, Apr 9, 2006 (15:22) #55

Things get lost or undone (or both) when one moves...*sigh*

~MarciaH Sun, Apr 9, 2006 (15:24) #56

I know ! Been there and done that. A year later I am still *sigh* ing. I checked http://iboogie.com/ Very impressive selections of categories on the left column.

~WERoland Sun, Apr 9, 2006 (15:33) #57

That's the cool clustering part...each one of those cats gives a subset of the total search results.

~MarciaH Sun, Apr 9, 2006 (15:50) #58

So I noticed. I will explore this one further. I have already emailed one researcher I know about it with his name searched for and his subcategories. Very impressive. It is like someone has put a magnifying glass to his life.

~cfadm Tue, Jul 3, 2007 (21:52) #59

The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines, July 2007. Below we’ve got the list in HTML format. 50matches.com* www.50matches.com Social Powered Search Accoona* www.accoona.com A. I. Search AfterVote (past SEM) www.aftervote.com Social Search Agent 55 www.agent55.com Meta Search Allth.at www.allth.at Continuous Search Answers.com www.answers.com Facts Search Audiobaba www.audiobaba.com Music Recommendation Blabline www.blabline.com Podcast Search blinkx www.blinkx.com Video Search Blogdigger* www.blogdigger.com Blog Search BlogDimension www.blogdimension.com International Bookmach www.bookmach.com Bookmark Search ChaCha {#1 2006} www.chacha.com Guided Search ClipBlast! www.clipblast.com Video Search Clusty mobile http://m.clusty.com Clusty Mobile Cognitionsearch www.cognitionsearch.com Semantic Search Collarity* www.collarity.com Social Search Congoo www.congoo.com Premium Content Search CrossEngine www.crossengine.com Meta Search Decipho www.decipho.com Filtered Search Deligio* www.deligio.com Software Search Dialogus SE of the Month http://dialogus.ru International Exalead www.exalead.com International Factbites www.factbites.com Facts Search Faroo http://www.faroo.com International FeedMiner www.feedminer.com RSS Feed Search Feedster ww.feedster.com RSS Feed Search FilesTube www.filestube.com File Sharing FindSounds* www.findsounds.com Sound Search Fisssh!* www.fisssh.com Filtered Search FyberSearch www.fybersearch.com Multi-featured Search GameSkoot www.gameskoot.com Games Search GenieKnows (Games) www.genieknows.com Games Search Gigablast www.gigablast.com Blog Search gogo www.gogo.ru International GoPubMed www.gopubmed.com Health Search GoshMe (past SEM) www.goshme.com Meta Meta Search Grabble wwwlgrabble.co.za International Grokker www.grokker.com Meta Search guruji www.guruji.com International Hakia www.hakia.com Meaning Based Search Healthline www.healthline.com Health Search Helia www.helia.cm Health Search iBoogie www.iboogie.com Clustered Search Icerocket www.icerocket.com Blog Search indeed www.indeed.com Job Search ixquick* www.ixquick.com Meta Search KartOO (past SEM) www.kartoo.com Clustering Search Knuru www.knuru.com Business Search KoolTorch (Past SEM) www.kooltorch.com Visualization Kosmix www.kosmix.com “Smart Search” Krugle www.krugle.com Code Search lijit* www.lijit.com People Search Like www.like.com Image Search LivePlasma* www.liveplasma.com Music Recommendation Mojeek www.mojeek.com Custom Search Engines (CSE) Molu www.themolu.com International MP3Realm http://mp3realm.org MP3 Search Ms. Freckles www.msfreckles.com/?lang=en Google Mash Up nnseek www.nnseek.com News Group Search Nutshell www.nutshell.com Meta Search Omgili www.omgili.com Social Search Pagebull www.pagebull.com Visual Results Picsearch www.picsearch.com International Pipl http://pipl.com People Search Pixsy www.pixsy.com Photo Search Pluggd www.pluggd.com Podcast Search Podnova www.podnova.com Podcast Search Purevideo* www.purevideo.com Video Search Quintura (past SEM) www.quintura.com Discovery Search Quintura kids http://kids.quintura.com kids search engine Revolutionhealth www.revolutionhealth.com Health Search RSS Micro www.rssmicron.com RSS Feeds Searchbots www.searchbots.net Continuous Search Searchles www.searchles.com Social Search SearchTheWeb2 www.searchtheweb2.com Search the Long Tail SeeIt* www.seeit.com Image Search Serph www.serph.com “Track buzz in real time” Sidekiq www.sidekiq.com “Search anything quick” Simplyhired www.simplyhired.com Job Search Skreemr www.skreemr.com Audio Search Slifter* www.slifter.com Mobile Shopping Search Sphere www.sphere.com Blog Posts Search Sproose* www.sproose.com Social Search Srchr www.srchr.com Meta Search Sugar Code the Web www.sugarcodes.com Command Line Surfwax www.surfwax.com Meaning Based Search Swamii* www.swamii.com Continuous Search TheFind.com www.thefind.com Shopping Search Trexy www.trexy.com “Search Trails” Turboscout www.turboscout.com Meta Search Twerq www.twerq.com Tabbed Results ViewFour www.viewfour.com Visual Results WasaLive http://en.wasalive.com RSS Search Wazap! www.wazap.com Games Search Whonu?* www.whonu.com Meta Search WiseNut www.wisenut.com Clustered Search Wize http://wize.com Product Search Yoople! www.yoople.com Collaborative Search Zuula* www.zuula.com Tabbed Search