There's not one complete catalog of everything on the internet, or one definitive source to use to search for information. There are many search tools and guides of various types available, some of which are listed below.

Search engines | back to top

What are search engines? Search engines are actually databases compiled by computer programs that scan the internet looking for pages to index. These search engines and databases are each different, so we recommend trying out your search at more than one site. Searching these specific engines individually, as opposed to using the meta-search engines mentioned below, allows you to use special commands to do a very precise search. To learn what these special commands are, look at the search help screen for each search engine.

When to use search engines: When you need to do very precise searches for specific information (e.g., K'axob, an ancient Maya archaeological site.), or for topics with multiple concepts or parts (e.g., the effects of second-hand smoke on children with respiratory diseases). These types of search engines can also be useful when you need to find a particular format of information (e.g., an image of a penguin).

Some search engines:

Alta Vista
Digital Equipment Corporation maintains this index of millions of web pages. Use " " to search by phrase, + to require that terms be present and - to exclude terms. Also has an advanced search feature. See Alta Vista's help page for more information.

Excite
The Excite database has more than 50 million web sites, and also contains some web site reviews, which can only be accessed by browsing the topical lists of sites and clicking on "Read Our Reviews" at the bottom of one of those lists. The site does not provide the option to search just the reviewed sites (although they claim to offer this option). See Excite's help page for more information.

Google
Google is one of the new search engines available for use on the internet. Quotations are not needed for phrase searching, though they can be used, as Google automatically searches for terms within close proximity. 'And' is the default operator so there is no need to enter it in your search string. You must place a '+' before stopwords and, or, not, in order to include the term. Google allows you to search backlinks, by clicking on the red bar in front of the site and the "I feel lucky" search option returns only the first relevant hit.

Hot Bot
Hot Bot, sponsored by Wired magazine, claims to have more than 50 million documents in it's database. The interface is an easy-to-use format, allowing searches by keywords, title, phrase, person, format and URL, as well as limiting by date and region. Also has an advanced search feature. See Hot Bot's help page for more information.

Lycos
Lycos claims to index over 55 million URLs (Uniform Resource Locators, or web addresses). They also provide Lycos TOP 5%, a selective directory of sites rated by reviewers. See Lycos's help page for more information.

Meta-search engines | back to top

What are meta-search engines? Meta-search engines provide the widest possible search of the internet because they search several different search engines at once.

When to use meta-search engines: Many times you cannot use very specific search commands (like phrase searching or using boolean operators) with these meta-search engines, so they are best for simple searches involving only one subject term (e.g., Wisconsin). For more precise searching, use one of the individual search engines listed above.

Some meta-search engines:

Dogpile
Dogpile searches Yahoo!, Lycos' A2Z, Excite Guide, Go2.com, PlanetSearch, Thunderstone, What U Seek, Magellan, Lycos, WebCrawler, InfoSeek, AltaVista, Excite and HotBot all at the same time! The search results will be grouped by the search engine which returned them. You can also search Usenet, FTP sites or Newswires. See Dogpile's help page for more information.

MetaCrawler
MetaCrawler searches AltaVista, Lycos, Infoseek, WebCrawler, Excite and Yahoo! at once. MetaCrawler queries the other search engines, organizes the results into a uniform format, ranks them by relevance and returns them to you. Also has an advanced search feature. See MetaCrawler's help page for more information.

Subject guides | back to top

What are subject guides? Subject guides are hierarchical listings of resources by topic, and are often created by experts in that subject area. Many of these lists also contain annotations or descriptions, and evaluative comments or reviews of the web sites they list, which will be a great help (and time-saving!) in determining whether they will be useful to you.

When to use subject guides: Subject guides can be a very useful starting point when you want to get an overview of the type of internet resources available on a particular topic, or see a listing of resources in a certain subject area which are considered good by someone who knows something about that subject. They are especially useful for relatively broad topics, where a search in a regular search engine would turn up far too many results, like "economics" or "archaeology."

Some subject guides:

Yahoo!
Probably the most famous and largest internet subject guide, providing a hierarchical subject listing of internet sites. These sites are classified into subject areas by humans, but are not reviewed in any way, although some are briefly described. Yahoo! is also a search engine (although smaller than some of the other search engines listed above), and has an advanced search feature as well. Another nice feature is the ability to restrict your search to any level of Yahoo!'s subject categories with the "Search only in ..." button. See Yahoo's help page for more information.

INFOMINE
A unique web resource, courtesy of the University of California, featuring well-organized access to over 9,500 important university-level research and educational tools on the internet. INFOMINE's collection of annotated and indexed links, provide concise descriptive information for substantive databases, guides to the internet for most disciplines, textbooks, conference proceedings, journals and more. The site can be browsed by subject, and allows you to search within broad subject categories.

Britannica Internet Guide
This service classifies, rates and reviews more than 65,000 web sites. Britannica editors search the web to identify quality web resources, which are clearly and concisely described, rated according to consistent standards (for depth, accuracy, completeness, utility, presentation, credentials/authority of the author or publisher, design and ease of navigation, frequency of revision) and indexed. A detailed browsable outline organizes thousands of topics, and the database is also searchable. See Britannica's help page for more information.

About.com
A collection of browsable and searchable special-interest web guides which lead to sites on just about every topic imaginable. Over 500 searchers have done the searching for you and created these subject guides. According to Nielsen NetRatings, About.com is a top 10 Web property used by one out of every five people on the internet. See About.com's help page for more information.

Subject-specific search engines | back to top

What are subject-specific search engines? Subject-specific search engines allow you to search only specific engines related to a given topic area. These types of search engines differ from the type discussed above because, rather than searching all over the world wide web for information, they search only databases or sites which have content within one subject area, such as philosophy or business.

When to use subject-specific search engines: Use subject-specific search engines when you want to narrow your search to one topic area, or when you need to search for information that would be likely to be found within an internet-accessible database, rather than simply on a web page.

Some subject-specific search engines:

Internet Sleuth
The Internet Sleuth is a bit different from the other search engines in that it maintains an index of searchable databases, rather than web sites, most of which can be searched directly from The Sleuth. Internet Sleuth allows you to browse lists of these databases by subject area.

Search.com
Search.com allows you to search the web by "specialty areas" such as Automotive, Living or Health, and do searches limited to those areas. They claim to make searching the internet easier, but this site is actually somewhat complicated. See Search.com's help page for more information.

More information on internet searching | back to top

There are many more internet search tools than can be listed here on this page. In fact, there are entire sites dedicated to reviewing and evaluating search tools, and offering information about them and help in searching them.

Some sites with more information about searching the internet:

Search Engine Watch
More than you ever wanted to know about search engines! This site includes a Guide To Search Engines, Search Engine Facts and Fun (an overview of the major search engines, history, trivia and even a search engine game), Search Engine Status Reports (how search engines are doing in a variety of areas), Search Engine reviews, tutorials on how to use search engines, insight into search engine technology and much more.

See what others are searching right now with Search Voyeurs!

Need help? Ask at the reference desk of the library.