Tools to Help You Find What You Want on the Web!
The Internet is a vast global supermarket of information. With more than 2 billion documents available and growing rapidly, sources exist on the Net that provide answers to almost any type of question. In a store this big, how do you ever find what you are looking for? Your success depends on choosing the right search tool and using it effectively.
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Favorites
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| www.google.com |
Google is a very popular Web Index/Search Engine. Often finds "the best" pages. |
| www.bing.com |
Bing is a search engine that brings together the best of search and people in your social networks. |
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www.altavista.com
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Alta Vista offers compact or detailed searches helping you find your way through 8 billion words filling 16 million Web pages. It also provides a full-text index of more than 13,000 newsgroups. |
For Kids
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| www.askforkids.com |
Ask for Kids is a site teachers like. It is a "Natural Language Site" designed for kids to ask a question. |
| kids.gov |
Kids.Gov provides government-related resources for educators and students in grades K-8. |
| kids.yahoo.com |
Yahoo! Kids calls itself "The Web Guide for Kids." |
Academic Search Tools
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| education.yahoo.com |
Yahoo! Education provides reference materials available for pretty much anything you want to look up. Resources include a thesaurus, dictionary, language dictionary, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, the World Factbook and many more. |
| usa.gov |
USA.Gov is a search engine/portal that provides direct access to searchable information from the United States government, state governments, and local governments. There are portals for kids, teens, and parents. |
| nationalgeographic.com/maps |
National Geographic's Map Machine is a collection of all the National Geographic maps in a searchable online database. Map Machine includes aerial satellite views and planetary maps. Resources include street maps and country profiles. |
Directory Search Tools
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Using a Web Directory is like browsing in a large library or bookstore, where best-selling books on the same topic are conveniently grouped together. Use a Directory when you want to explore what's available on a topic.
Web Directories are created by editors or trained researchers who categorize or classify Web sites by subject. Directories are more selective than Indexes.
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| www.lycos.com |
Lycos, from Carnegie Mellon University, searches 4.5 million locations on the Web. This is a good place to begin research on the WWW. |
| www.yahoo.com |
Yahoo! is enormous and easily searchable. It is categorized for easy browsing. It is updated daily and hundreds of new sites come online every day. |
Web Index Tools
(Known as Search Engines)
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Sometimes browsing isn't the best approach, particularly if you need rather specific information. In a library, you would examine the index in the back of a book to see whether it contains information on a specific topic. On the Web, when you know what you are looking for, use a Web Index to locate it. Using a Web Index is like searching within the indexes of all the books contained in the world's largest libraries at once.
Search Engines use special software programs (called robots, spiders, or crawlers) to find Web pages and "index" or list all words within each one. Indexes capture the largest amount of information on the Web, but no Index lists everything on the Web.
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| www.ask.com |
Ask.com is a "Natural Language Site" that allows you to ask the search engine a question. |
Meta-Search Tools
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"Meta" means "more comprehensive." A meta-searcher is a convenient tool that allows you to construct a search and then forward it to many different Web Indexes and Directories at once. They are a quick and easy way to expand your search, particularly when other tools don't find what you are looking for. Like Web Indexes, they work best for specific, multi-word searches. They also allow you to choose which tools your search will be sent to. (You may need to select "Advanced Search" in order to see this feature.) |
| www.dogpile.com |
Dogpile uses about 15 search engines and directories. Some are big, some are small and esoteric. |
| www.ixquick.com |
Ixquick uses AOL, Altavista, LookSmart, EuroSeek, Excite, FindWhat, MSN, alltheweb, GoTo, Hotbot, and Yahoo. Tied for best in meta-search list. |
| www.metacrawler.com |
MetaCrawler uses AltaVista and some minor databases. No longer as productive as it used to be. |
| www.search.com |
Search.com is hosted by CNET which offers itself as "The source for computing and technology." Their search tool uses more than 800 specialized engines from around the Web. |
| www.surfwax.com |
SurfWax uses several good, large search engines, directories, US Govt. tools, and news sources. Does not use Google or Northern Light. |