John's Research Resources Page 4
Search Engines
Using Search Engines
If you're trying to find a particular site or document on the Internet or
just looking for a resource list on a particular subject, you can use one
of the many available on-line search engines. These engines allow you to
search for information in many different ways - some search titles or
headers of documents, others search the documents themselves, and still
others search other indexes or directories.
Remember, to come back to this page, open the GO MENU, and SELECT John's Research Resources Page 4
Search Engines generally have a dialog box like this one, at INFOSEEK:
- And now, a few words about how search engines do their work. This information is essential to academic researchers. At each search engine site, a database is created which holds indexed information from selected sites. In each case, the site administrators select some of the many www sites on the Internet -- and some institutions will include FTP sites, Gopher, and WAIS sites as well. In no case (yet) has anyone thoroughly searched, indexed, and published information on all of the sites on the Internet. In each case, the administrators include the sites which they believe to be most important, and, of course, they include only the sites which someone at their institution has found. Some, for example, may be more interested in business information, some in science, and so on. Therefore, if you are interested in doing a thorough search for information on the net, you need to use several search engines. In no case will you find all of the sites on the Internet, since site addresses and html's appear and disappear every day.
- With that in mind, here is a list of some of the search engines, with comments on some:
YAHOO
This is currently a widely used commercial site. -- http://www.yahoo.com
LYCOS
A commercial search engine. -- http://www.lycos.com/
FTP SEARCH '95 is a web search engine devoted specifically to FTP sites. Administered in Norway, it appears to focus on academic sites. -- http://ftpsearch.unit.no/ftpsearch
SAVVY SEARCH includes links to other search engines, and allows you to use several search engines simultaneously. Savvy also allows you to specify the type of source, i.e., academic, reference material, software, etc. -- http://guaraldi.cs.colostate.edu:2000/
Galaxy allows searches of gopher sitesand telnet sites as well as a large collection of Web pages. In this search engine, you may enter more than one term separated by a space and Galaxy will search the two words as one term. Example = "capital punishment" Entered as shown (without the quotation) the search will find only this pair of words -- not files with the words "capital" and "punishment" in different contexts.
This site claims to be El primer servidor mundial de busqueda en lengua espan~ola Whether it is the first or not, it links to Spanish language sources. -- http://www.ole.es. The server seems to be associated with a university in Barcelona.
is a recent search site which encompasses many sites -- academic or otherwise. This concept could be useful once you know the kind of institution which has the information you want.
NETFIND uses FINGER and other resources to find Email addresses.
Links to Other Pages:
we recommend viewing these lessons in the order shown.