Major Search Engines

About AltaVista

Strengths: Best at finding relevant pages. Indexes more pages than the other engines.

Weakness: Lacks graphical interface for power searches.

Altavista indexes a huge number of pages and typically responds to a search with a high percentage of relevant links. It doesn't weed out duplicates or bad links well.

You'll get the best results from AltaVista if you use Boolean queries.

Alta Vista

 

 

About Excite

Strengths: Can search for concepts, not just words.

Weaknesses: Produces too many irrelevant or duplicate pages.

You can spend a lot of time wading through duplicate or irrelevant pages. It's power searches aren't as strong as those available at HotBot or Altavista. However, you can search for concepts - a search for martial arts finds pages about kick-boxing and karate, even if the words martial arts aren't on the page.

Excite

 

About HotBot

Strengths: Easy searches produce consistently good results. Good graphical interface.

Weaknesses: Site descriptions not always accurate or helpful.

HotBot's database is the most current, so it rarely yields bad links. It's is quite accurate, producing fewer irrelevant or duplicate pages than some engines.

HotBot

 

About Infoseek

Strengths: Produces a very high percentage of relevant links and few duplicates or bad links.

Weaknesses: No advanced search tool.

Infoseek is good for basic searches because it produces fewer irrelevant documents than most, if not all, of its rivals. However, it does not have advanced search capabilities.

InfoSeek

 

About Lycos

Strengths: You can search the Web, sounds, pictures, the Top 5% directory, or personal pages with one click.

Weaknesses: Produces a high number of duplicate pages and bad links

Lycos does a decent job combining search and directory features, if you adjust it using the advanced search (Lycos Pro) interface. While it is easy to customize, it doesn't find as many pages as other engines.

Lycos

 

About Yahoo

Strengths: Easy to use and lots of relevant information if you know the correct content category.

Weaknesses: Results aren't as comprehensive as with true search engines.

Yahoo is a search engine, it's a directory - an organized collection of Web sites arranged by subject. When you know what you're looking for, Yahoo can be much easier to use and produce more useful information than search engines. However, it is not the best choice for a comprehensive search.

Yahoo

 

Go to Metasearch Engines

 

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