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- HotBot uses a single intuitive form to search for a phrase, a person, or any combination of search terms, and to tune your output preferences.
Caution: Some people think the interface tries to do too much at once. There's a lot there; take your time discovering HotBot's capabilities.
Tip: Click on the Open All button to narrow your results by adding new terms; to limit by date, geography, or Web domain (.com, .edu, and so on); or to look for specific multimedia files and plug-ins.
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- Excite's main strength is its concept searching. Not only will it look for the exact words or phrases you enter, but it's smart enough to identify and factor in related terms and ideas as well. If you key in "Hawaii" and "vacation," Excite should know to search for "holiday," "travel," and "tourism," too, as well as the names of the individual Hawaiian islands. This machine intelligence is especially helpful when you're searching for a concept that's hard to define or that can be described in several different ways.
Excite's approach to indexing involves 14 or so "channels," ranging from Health to Lifestyles to Politics, with more specific subheadings under each one. Many of the listed sites carry ratings and reviews by Excite's editorial team.
Tip: When you find a Web page that's close to what you want, click on More Like This. Excite will use that page as an example and pull up similar ones.
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- Infoseek's index is skewed toward what most folks are likely to look for: Entertainment, Shopping, Sports, Travel, and a helpful category called Getting it Done that covers job hunting, money management, and major purchases like cars, computers, and houses. You can refine your search in stages, starting broad and then narrowing to more specific aspects of the topic. Enter "U2," for instance, and then, at the bottom of the search results page, add the lyrics that are running through your head. Or, start your search with a request for U2 | lyrics.
Caution: Infoseek sometimes comes back with an overwhelming number of results; remember that you don't have to look at more than the first few dozen.
Tip: Use Infoseek to search for particular types of data, including images, company profiles, local news, and live events on the Web. A single click brings up subcategories and/or a list of relevant sites, most with one- or two-line descriptions.
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- When AltaVista debuted, it was literally an overnight sensation. Nothing else was capable of retrieving passing mentions buried several layers down in a multipage Web site. AltaVista is still a great resource, especially when you're looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack, researching a topic for which there isn't much information online, or trying to find everything that's been written on a subject.
Caution: AltaVista has slipped a bit in the ratings by standing still while its competitors have been busily adding enhancements.
Tip: To reduce information overload, use Advanced Search mode and list your most important keywords first.
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- Several other search engines offer Usenet searching, but Deja News, which only searches newsgroups, is the most powerful. You can zero in on newsgroup postings on a certain subject, or by a particular person (see "Find Old Friends").
Caution: Deja News is almost frightening in its ability to extract postings by a particular individual, regardless of context. Bear this in mind when you post to newsgroups, and respect others' privacy as well.
Tip: Deja News can supplement your Web research by helping you tap the pulse of the public and discover what people are talking about and what they really think. You'll often discover information and opinions (especially opinions!) that don't turn up in formally published documents or official Web sites, or that might not show up until later.
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- Inference Find (IFind) is one of the most sophisticated of several "parallel" search sites operating on the Web. It submits your query to half a dozen top search engines simultaneously and quickly merges the results, removes duplicates, and clusters what's left into logical groups, usually by type of site.
Caution: Beware of the "lowest common denominator" effect: If you enter a complex search request, your results will be limited by what each individual search engine understands and can process.
Tip: Simple requests with unique words work best.
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- Lycos lets you confine your keyword search to the top 5 percent of Web sites as determined by Lycos's reviewers. The Custom Search option is flexible and powerful, but the results may be less comprehensive or focused than you'll find elsewhere.
Caution: The Lycos site has gotten cluttered -- although you may consider it "enhanced" -- with side offerings like shopping, maps and city guides, stock quotes, directories, news headlines, and selected subject links.
Tip: Lycos shines at multimedia searching; it lets you display or play the files you find directly from the search results page.
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- The deservedly popular Yahoo, often classified with the top search engines, is really a hierarchical guide to what's worthwhile on the Web. Yahoo covers everything from heavy-duty technical and scientific research sites to health resources, current news, sports, and entertainment. Yahoo has spawned a family of regional indexes that make it much easier to locate Net resources with a local or international slant. There's also Yahooligans for kids, My Yahoo for roll-your-own personalized information delivery, and links to classifieds, white-page directories, and dozens of other research tools.
Tip: Use Yahoo when you need to do a focused but comprehensive search and don't have time to plow through thousands of documents.
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- The Argus Clearinghouse was designed by librarians, and it shows. That's a compliment, in case you're wondering; librarians know all about indexing. Its original name, The Clearinghouse for Subject-Oriented Internet Resource Guides, says it all. Instead of dredging up hundreds of sites loosely clustered around your area of interest, Argus attempts to focus on key resources, "ultimate" Web pages, and collections of pointers that pertain to the topic. The Television category, for instance, consists of a dozen or so authoritative (or at least ambitious) top-level sites. Each is ranked on a one-to-five scale. Most reviews are dated, too; bonus points for that.
Caution: Argus isn't flashy, and threading through appropriate categories and subcategories requires a little effort on your part.
Tip: Its coverage of scholarly as well as popular Net resources makes Argus a prime starting point for serious searchers.
