Search Engines:
Finding What You Want on the NET

Alta Vista

Search.Com

DejaNews

Excite

Hot Bot

Infoseek Guide

Lycos

Magellan

Open Text Index

Shareware

Sharing Resource Library
(shareware)

Starting Point

Web Crawler

Yahooligans for Kids

Yahoo

Search engines work in many different ways. Some search titles or headers of documents, others search the documents themselves and still others search other indexes or directories. Read the descriptions below.

ALTA VISTA
Offering compact or detailed searches through what the company claims is the largest Web index, Digital Equipment Corporation's Alta Vista can help you find your way through 8 billion words filling 16 million Web pages. It also provides a full-text index of more than 13,000 newsgroups.The engine allows for simple and advanced queries. Point to the Advanced Query page.

DEJANEWS
Search what the company claims is the world's largest publicly searchable Usenet news archive with DejaNews. Versatile search options allow you to find articles by date, author, subject, and newsgroup. Usenet is a powerful Internet resource; DejaNews helps put it to work for you. Tap into what teachers say about classrooms, lessons, strategies, the literature they teach. Search for Children's Literature discussions, Outcomes-Based Education, Whole Language--you name it, someone is discussing it in cyberspace.

EXCITE
Excite tracks down information by searching for concepts, not just keywords. It supports "and" and "or," and, by repeating important words in the search request and offering variant spellings, you often get strong hits. Updated weekly, Excite's database contains what the company claims are more than 1.5 million Web pages, 50,000-plus Web page reviews written by journalists, the latest two weeks of Usenet news, and classifieds.

INFOSEEK GUIDE
This searchable directory provides reviews of popular Internet resources--Web sites, Usenet newsgroups, and FTP and Gopher sites--cross-referenced across multiple topics. Once you've found a relevant site, the "Find Similar" function searches for more of the same. The guide performs precise searches for specific phrases and proper names, and searches are sensitive to case, numbers, and special characters (for example, AT&T; or 49ers).

LYCOS
This comprehensive catalog of the Internet finds what you need in seconds, including text, graphics, sounds, and videos. Lycos is the most open search of all the search engines, i.e., it's the least bound to categories and more friendly to open searches.

MAGELLAN
Explore Magellan, McKinley's Internet Guide. Magellan provides reviews and ratings for a vast collection of Web, FTP, and Gopher sites, and Usenet newsgroups. Users can browse Magellan topics or search specific keywords or phrases. Magellan's green-light feature indicates content that is deemed appropriate for general viewing.

SEARCH.COM
Search.com allows you to use the search engine of your choice.

SHAREWARE.COM
Shareware.com makes it simple to find software on the Internet. More than 200,000 files are available for easy searching, browsing, and downloading from shareware and corporate archives.

YAHOO!
Arguably the pioneer Internet guide, Yahoo has built a comprehensive cross-discipline resource base. It recognizes categories, but don't let the constraints of their classification system get you down. Yahoo now works in tandem with Alta Vista.

YAHOOLIGANS!
Yahoo designed for kids!

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