The Internet for Graduate Students
Introducing Search Engines

CONDUCT A SEARCH USING A WEB SEARCH ENGINE

An Internet search engine allows the user to enter keywords relating to a topic and retrieve information about Internet sites containing those keywords. 

Keep in mind however:

  • Number of pages on the Web: approximately 2 billion and growing at a rate of 7.3 million daily. 
  • Search Engines index 25-50% on the web. They rely on web page indexes that were compiled weeks before and pages deep within web sites are often missed, as are multimedia files, bibliographies, the bits of information in databases and pages that come in pdf, Adobe's portable document format.

 

Nevertheless, search engines remain the most popular way to search for information via the internet.   Web search engines have the advantage of offering access to a vast range of information resources located on the Internet. 

Recommended starting points:

Google is one of the most popular search engines. This is a second generation search engine that ranks pages by the number of links from pages ranked high by the service. 

AllTheWeb contains advanced search techniques and allows you to search a specific category such as news and pictures.

Alta Vista searches Web sites and Usenet newsgroups with advanced Boolean and field search options. 

Hotbot - another general search engine.  Hotbot links directly to Lycos and other search engines for different results. Offers advanced Boolean and field search options.

MetaCrawler is a good site to try if your topic is obscure or if you want to retrieve results from a variety of search engines with a single search statement. This service searches multiple search engines simultaneously and offers useful search options. 

This is a list of more search engines.

When should you use a search engine?

A Search Exercise  

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