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How to
Search the
Internet
edited by Hanno Lecher
Last updated on March 6, 1999
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General Introductions
Probably the most important source on search engines is Search Engine Watch (http://www.searchenginewatch.com/), edited by Danny Sullivan and containing the following services: Webmaster's Guide To Search Engines (how search engines index your web site; tips on gaining and maintaining a high position); Search Engine Facts and Fun (overview of the major search engines; information on specialty search services; trivia and interesting facts); Search Engine Status Reports (how search engines are doing, ranging from the financial, to the technical. See the Search Engine EKGs!); Search Engine Resources (search engine reviews, tutorials on how to use search engines, insight into search engine technology and more); and a free Search Engine Report Newsletter.
Another very good introduction on Browsing and Searching Internet Resources (http://www.ub2.lu.se/nav_menu.html) is provided by Traugott Koch (Lund University Library, Sweden).
Compare also T.M. Ciolek (ANU, Australia): Annotated Guide to WWW Search Engines (http://www.ciolek.com/SearchEngines.html).
Meta Crawlers
Meta crawlers send your search term(s) to different search engines and organize the results into a more or less uniform format.
- MetaCrawler (http://www.metacrawler.com/)
A good service with "flexible configuration, clean display of search results, and good response time. For a quick search of the major search engines, MetaCrawler should be considered the number one meta-search engine." (Jian Liu, Guide to Meta Search Engines).
For more meta crawlers and a thorough description confer the Guide to Meta-Search Engines (http://www.indiana.edu/~librcsd/search/meta.html ) by Jian Liu (Indiana University Libraries, USA).
Search Engines
Search engines are programs that index anything they can find on the WWW and respond to queries with an often long list of results (depending on your query) containing title, URL, and usually the first few lines of the pages found.
Helpful if you are looking for a certain phrase or word in a document, e.g. when searching a company, looking for a person, or having a well defined set of keywords ensuring a limited set of results.
A study by Steve Lawrence and C. Lee Giles ("Searching the World Wide Web". In: Science, Vol. 280, 3 April 1998, pp. 98-100) has measured effectiveness with which various search engines indexed an estimated 320 mln pages comprising the WWW universe in mid-December 1997:
The six most effective WWW search engines (Dec 1997)
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Database overall WWW percent of estimated *
coverage invalid links valid WWW coverage
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HotBot 34% 5.3 32.2%
Altavista 28% 2.5 27.3%
Northern Light 20% 5.0 19.0%
Excite 14% 2.0 13.7%
Infoseek 10% 2.6 9.7%
Lycos 3% 1.6 2.9%
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* computed from Lawrence & Giles (1998) data
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Copyright © 1998 by T.Matthew Ciolek
- HotBot (http://www.hotbot.com/index.html )
A fast and extensive search engine, this is probably the best choice for general queries on the Web.
- AltaVista (http://altavista.digital.com/)
Next to Yahoo!, Alta Vista is possibly the best known search aid on the WWW. Since recently it also supports CJK search (you have to enter a special page for that). The biggest drawback is that the number of results can vary dramatically between several identical searches.
General WWW Catalogues
General WWW catalogues are (mostly searchable) indices based on categories. Helpful if you do not exactly know what you are looking for but want to find something concerning a certain topic.
- Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com/)
One of the earliest indices of the Web. Entries are generated and categorized by the creators, so the quality of the descriptions (only a few words are allowed) is often biased and very poor. Still, the impressing size of the database makes it an important tool to track down information on certain topics. Now also available: Chinese Yahoo! (http://www.chinese.yahoo.com ).
- Magellan Internet Guide (http://www.mckinley.com/)
This service is an interesting mixture between a common search engine (it shares the database with Excite, containing some 50 mio sites), and a catalogue similar to Yahoo!'s. However, the catalogue contains only the more than 60,000 sites that have been reviewed by the Magellan team.These reviews contain good descriptions and a rating up to four stars.
Specialized Catalogues
Specialized Catalogues (or "Virtual Libraries") are topic oriented databases maintained by specialists on these topics. They manually screen the Web for relevant material and usually add comments on content and value of the resources. Although these catalogues do not have the size of search engines or general WWW catalogues, they are an excellent place to start looking for relevant material on a certain topic.
- Argus Clearinghouse (http://www.clearinghouse.net/)
A database listing a wide range of topic oriented guides.
- WWW Virtual Library Project (http://www.w3.org/vl/ )
Established in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the WWW. It consists of some 300 Virtual Libraries on just as many different topics. Most of the maintainers are research scholars at universities all over the world. The China WWW Virtual Library (aka Internet Guide for Chinese Studies, http://www.sino.uni-heidelberg.de/netguide.htm) contains more than 1000 links devided into 16 subchapters.
This page is maintained at the
Institute of Chinese Studies, University of Heidelberg
© Hanno Lecher 1998-1999
(Send me an email)
URL of this page:
http://www.sino.uni-heidelberg.de/igcs/txsearch.htm
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