Search Engines - Evaluative Listing - J. Murrey Atkins Library

The Best of the Best Google - BEST! Currently claims to link to nearly 9 billion webpages.For best results use multiple keywords. TIP: Put quote marks ("any phrase") around phrases. Google has a number of very useful sub-searches. • Google: Scholar - articles and documents from scholarly publications and academic institutions - many full-text sources, links to UNC subscriptions • Google: Print - looks inside the book, some public domain books are now available full-text. • Google: Images - find millions of pictures, graphs, etc. by subject • Google: UncleSam (US state and federal and local government sites) • Google: News - search and browse the latest news headlines from 4,500 newspaper and media websites • Google: Maps - wonderful maps and driving directions • Google: Patents - 7,000,000 full-text patents • Google: Blogsearch - find a blog • Google Groups - indexed articles from discussion groups • More Google options We also recommend the Google toolbar. For fun, listen to this segment from NPR on "Googling." (Real Player™) and this flash Google spoof We also recommend this article: Markoff, J. and Zachary, G. P. (2003, April 13). In Searching the Web, Google Finds Riches, New York Times. Retrieved April 20, 2003, from LexisNexis Academic database.
The rest of the best: We hardly ever use anything other than Google now, but in case you are interested - these are some of the other major engines available.
Microsoft is working really hard to compete with Google.
Just for the sheer fun - we recommend you try asking Ms. Dewey - requires Macromedia Flash
Live Search - MSN search engine updated Live Search: Books - find public domain full-text books
• Ask.com - New listing
• Hotbot - you can now search four engines here (Fast, Google, Inktomi and Teoma). Huge number of pages associated with this engine. Gives relevancy scores. Because Hotbot is not included in the MetaSearch engines there will be little duplication of results from other engines.
• Yahoo Search - new interface, our test searches have produced excellent results.
• WiseNut - Claims "1,495,332,308 Web pages and counting!" Very similar in appearance to Google. Our test searches came out very well.
• Dogpile (MetaSearch) Searches 20 other engines. Possibly the most comprehensive. Does not combine results. If you really need to find something, start here.
• ixquick Available in six European languages. Returns top ten result from AOL, Altavista, Excite, Fast Search, Goto, Hotbot, Infoseek, Live Directory, LookSmart, Lycos, MSN, Snap, Webcrawler, Yahoo. We found it a little slow.
The rest of the best: MetaSearch Engines These search several engines, compile results and eliminate duplication
• Mamma The "Mother of all Seach Engines" - this multi-threaded engine searches Altavista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Webcrawler, Yahoo, Comparable to Metacrawler.
• MetaCrawler Multi-threaded, combines results from other engines including Altavista, Lycos, Infoseek, Yahoo, etc.
Search Engines These search their own (very large) databases of hyperlinks
• AltaVista One of the the largest databases, the first few hits will be the most relevant.
• AOL NetFind Comprehensive. Similar to Excite
• Ask Jeeves This engine uses natural (English) language. The interface has been cleaned up, but this reviewer does not like the commercial results which pop up at the top of your results. See also: Ask Jeeves for Kids
• Excite Database of 50 million URLs. Search by category or keyword.
• All the Web Our sample search turned up old results and lots of irrelevant hits. Big, but definitely not the best.
• MSN Currently ranked third in size by Search engine showdown. Uses uses an Inktomi database. We got good results with our test search.
• WebCrawler This one has been around from the beginning. Search by keyword or catagory. Brief descriptions of websites are given.
Classified listings Websites are listed by categories. Sometimes these are called "directories."
• About.Com Classified listing. Be sure to check "web" to get a comprehensive list of sites. There is a lot here, but you can get stuck inside of a frame, so use google first.
• Lycos Finds sites by category, gives helpful descriptions of websites.
• LookSmart Closest rival of Yahoo, a human compiled directory of the web. LookSmart seems to be on target with most subject / keyword searches.