Search Engines & Directories


Search Engines
Links to different types of search engines, including meta-engines.

Directories
Other sites which present evaluated websites for educational purposes, usually listed by topic.





SEARCH ENGINES

The following list uses a published list of recommended search engines.

1) The C/Net Search Page comes from the same people who present the cable TV and internet program C/Net. You can start searches for several search engines directly from this page.

Address: www.search.com

2) Excite is a relatively new kind of search tool that has a database of 1.5 million documents. It performs not a key word, but a "concept search." When you type in one or more words to search, Excite looks not just for your exact words, but also will retrieve documents whose word frequency profile resemble the documents that contain all the key words you chose. Also, Excite has a database of 30,000 reviews of Web sites.

Address: www.excite.com

3) The Lycos database currently has about 91% of the Web indexed and is one of the Web's largest databases. It doesn't index the full text, just the title words and the first couple of lines of text. Lycos is a busy site and is sometimes difficult to access in the afternoons and early evenings.

Address: www.lycos.com

4) RocketInfo's Search Engine. To receive current news from the last five days heralding from many different presses, use RocketInfo. The results page issues the article title, a brief summary and the source of the article at the bottom. These articles only go back five days.

Address: http://www.rocketnews.com/index.html

5) Hotbot is a joint venture between HotWired and Inktomi and uses artificial intelligence to figure out what you are looking for. This is a good tool for someone who has trouble focusing in on exactly what to look for.

Address: www.hotbot.com

6) Webcrawler is a product of America Online's GNN. This is an adequate tool that includes GNNselect website reviews.

Address: www.webcrawler.com

7) Yahoo is the most famous of the Internet subject tree directories, and is put together by people, not computers. Each day new sites are evaluated by content and "catalogued" by subject into the subject tree. Yahoo is really a searchable index rather than a search engine.

Address: www.yahoo.com

8) Yahooligans is a subject tree and searchable index especially geared toward children ages 8 through 14. This site also provides lots of useful information about the web and offers an excellent help page.

Address: www.yahooligans.com

9) Metacrawler allows you to search several search engines at the same time. You can do a "fast" or a "comprehensive" search and tailor several aspects of your query. A listing of how many "hits" you received from each search engine is given and the results collated. It is interesting to see the number of "hits" by search engine.

Address: www.metacrawler.com

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DIRECTORIES

1) Federal Resources for Educational Excellence

30 federal agencies have organized all the educational websites that are produced with the help of federal money into a directory broken down into 10 subject headings such as art, science, social studies etc. Hundreds of links make this a good place to start a web research project.

Address: www.ed.gov/free

2) Kathy Schrock's guide for Educators

This site indexes dozens of web pages in 22 broad subject areas including all of our departments. A good starting point for most research projects.

Address: school.discovery.com/schrockguide/

3) Librarians Index to the Internet

An outstanding guide to over 3000 recommended Internet sites. Since this site is operated by librarians it is of course extremely well-organized and helpful. 42 general categories and hundreds of sub-categories make it easy to navigate this site.

Address: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/InternetIndex

4) Library of Congress homepage

LC has a well-organized, easy-to-use webpage that includes government research databases and the Thomas page on current activity in Congress. The staff at LC has also organized suggested sites for various topics and provide direct links to most of them. This is a very valuable site.

Address: www.loc.gov

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