Yale University Library/Internet Search Engines

Exercise 1: Introduction to Internet Searching Tools

Internet searching tools include search engines and Internet indexes. Both are useful tools to find resources on the world wide web, but there are differences you should note before searching them.

A search engine consists of three elements:

• Crawler routines that search Web pages and/or usenet news and index their contents.
• A database constructed from the informaiton gathered by the crawler.
• A query engine, or searching software, that provides an interface to the database.

These engines search part of a web document and return information based on your query terms. This type of search engine include both single services like:

• InfoSeek (http://www.infoseek.com/)
• Lycos (http://lycos.cs.cmu.edu)
• Open Text Web Index (http://www.opentext.com/omw/f-omw.html)
• Alta Vista (http://www.altavista.digital.com)

And meta-search engines like:

• HotBot (http://www.hotbot.com)
• Savvy Search (http://guaraldi.cs.colostate.edu:2000/)
• Internet Sleuth (http://www.intbc.com/sleuth)
• MetaCrawler (http://metacrawler.cs.washington.edu:8080/index.html)

In addition to search engines, you can search Internet Indexes, which provide access through subject categories. These services don't "crawl" the web to match your search terms to individual documents, but consist of directories of web documents that the services have compiled. Although the directories have smaller databases than the search engines, they usually provide more complete and accurate information on a given topic. The most popular and comprehensive Internet index is Yahoo. Others include:

• Magellan (http://www.mckinley.com/)
• Excite (http://www.excite.com) *Excite also has a search engine.

On to Exercise 2: Internet Index: Yahoo