Scotsmist Personal Computer Support, Search Engines

Search Resources

If you want to read more about search engines, how they work and how you can get the most from them, I particularly recommend reading Search Engine Watch and also the about.com Websearch guide. Many search engines now rank sites according to how many sites link to them and weightings assigned to those sites rather than relying on meta tags. You are better choosing an appropriate title for a site or thinking on words that could appear in the meta description rather than spending a lot of time on keyword searches which usually tend to produce hundreds or thousands of results.

WWW Links Search Engines

Search Engines

In the left margin you will find links to other useful resources.

Search Engines

Websearchengines is top of my list of search pages. The site has regional links, Scottish and English links, cool links, web links, directories you can browse to find link's, as well as world-wide searches and did I mention their forum. This is a superbly compiled guide to the web. I have been using the engines for all of my recent searches and the results have taken me to interesting links that I would never have visited. The search is hosted by Aequorea. Search the best engines.

AltaVista probably indexes more of the Internet than any other search engine. This means it can be good for something specific, but be prepared for a long list of search results. However, there are some useful features on the results pages that should help you focus your search, such as the "related searches" option.

Ask Jeeves is a bit different to other search engines. It's a question and answer service which is particularly good at finding product reviews. Just type in your question and let Jeeves do the hard work for you. There's a link to the US site if you want to widen your search beyond the UK index.

Baldey allows you to search up to 10 major search engines at the same time. Use the "fastest 3 search engines" option to display the results of the first search engines to respond to Baldey and test which search engines really are the fastest on the net. Try the "surprise me" button which will take you directly to the webpage of the first result without displaying the entire result page - do you feel lucky today? Baldey recently changed their name to ixquick.com.

CombTheNet is another meta search system with affiliation to the most popular engines such a GoTo, Lycos, Google and Fast. This search engine also offers easy searching for images, video and audio files. The results are simple and fast. I highly recommend this one.

Excite allows you to search for UK sites only or across the World Wide Web. The main search page also has UK news headlines which are customisable.

Fast Search as the name suggests, is blisteringly fast. Run by Norwegian PhDs dedicated to making your searches faster than ever, they promise "all the web, all the time". There is a very useful advanced search page that can filter by words, domains and by language. Better known as AllTheWeb.

Google and the Virgin Net search engine allows you to make your searches simpler and more accurate. An exclusive UK and Ireland index lets you find sites based solely in the UK and Ireland. Simply type in words that describe what you are looking for - the more the better. Google also acquired Deja.com.

Hot Bot is now a large, fast and up-to-date powerful search engine that allows you to fine-tune your search very precisely and delivers accurate results.

Lycos have provided a dedicated MP3 search engine that makes it easy to locate your favourite tunes. MP3 files can be downloaded and played on a computer or a portable MP3 player. The record company bigwigs are quaking in their cowboy boots.

Mamma.com is a "Smart Meta Search Engine." When the user enters a query at the Mamma.com website, Mamma's powerful proprietary technology simultaneously queries 10 of the major Search Engines and properly formats the words and syntax for each source being probed. Mamma then creates a virtual database, organises the results into a uniform format and presents them by relevance and source. In this manner, Mamma.com provides the end user with a highly relevant and comprehensive set of search results.

Metacrawler fires off your queries to several different search engines and brings back hits in one neat package, ranked by relevance. Which means it's very useful if you're after something rather obscure because it will look for it in several different places at once.

Monstercrawler is another page that allows you to search all the major engines with just one click. The site is powered by Infospace.

Mirago Indexing of only UK sites and those of general interest to UK users, Mirago is a feature-rich site, with many sophisticated options like family-friendly filter, site search, and finding which sites link to a particular result.

Northern Light is a unique search engine that will group your search results into different subject "folders", helping you to narrow down your results. For example, it will group the results of a search on "Tony Blair" into folders such as international politics, articles from New Statesman magazine and education. You can also search recent news stories from a variety of international sources.

OneSearch.com was created in response to the growing need for a new search engine that would cater to the small business person, provide a one-stop-shopping web site with attractive and useful features.

Raging Search from Alta Vista is getting back to its roots with this streamlined pure search site. Looking very similar to, and ranking sites in the same way as Google, Raging Search is for the search enthusiast interested in speed and quality of results, not slow-loading ads and irrelevant content.

SearchHippo.com is all about fast and friendly web search results. Rather than focus on finding the most obscure pages on the web, they focus on providing the best quality results.

ScrubTheWeb has been bringing powerful software solutions to the world for over 20 years. In 1995 we launched our very first Internet site which had a tremendous response. Since then, we have helped design over 1,300 Web pages and created some of the most powerful software found on the Internet today.

Search-Wizard isn't actually a search engine however it does allow you to search over two hundred search engines from just one box. Find exactly what you want quickly and simply.

TheEngineRoom This UK Directory offers hand picked sites selected on content and quality. The Directory database consists of sites which meet this criteria. There aim is to provide featured sites that appeal to people who have these attributes in mind. The Engine Rooms Search Room contains multiple search engines for Internet surfers. UK ISP listings are available in the ISP Room. Browse the main directory, or use the site all category search facility.

UK Plus has specially selected sites for people living in the UK, organised by topic. Many categories have quick links to useful resources and new or changed sites are cleverly highlighted. A full Internet search is also offered.

VIVISIMO is another useful search engine to add to your arsenal. You can, as with others, search the entire Web or narrow your search to one of several categories. Vivisimo calls on some 9 major search engines for data, and the search layout and the display can be customised to your liking. But the best feature may be the organisation of results into descriptive folders that seem to more readily provide the information you're looking for.

WhatUSeek.com started as a very simple whatUseek Web search index in 1995 and has blossomed into a still-growing full suite of search-related properties called the whatUseek Network.

WebTopSearch has over 500 Million Documents. The more words you type, the better the results.

Yahoo! UK & Ireland began cataloguing websites in a serious way before anyone else did, and became the most popular Internet search service as a consequence. Although it remains the largest Web guide complied by humans, the catalogue is still relatively small. The comprehensive directory structure is easy to browse if you're looking for general information, or search using keywords for something specific.

7MetaSearch.com is a metasearch engine that reduces surfing time by aggregating the best content on the Web from the most popular search engines. By providing useful web site information through the One-Click SiteDetails™ program, surfers are assured of the perfect search every time.

Directories are usually human-compiled guides to the web, where sites are organised by category.

Directory Searches

SiteAsk.com (and it's sister site JetPad.com) are meta search sites that combine the search results of several search engines into a single result list. The results are presented without the clutter and irrelevant features that other search engines may have.

Jayde.com is a search engine directory with 1 million plus site listings and currently receives 7,000+ site submissions/day. Jayde also features a fast, multi-featured search engine, 4 powerful search methods, choice of 10, 20, 30 or 50 search results per page, dated search results, achoice of Full Description or Site Titles Only search result output and a search within search results option.

LookSmart's strength is in the search results. Founded in 1995 with the simple but ambitious goal of helping people find what they are looking for on the Internet, LookSmart is one of the global leaders in Web directories.

Overture changed their name from goto.com to better reflect who they are and what they do. Overture, formerly GoTo, say they are the Internet's leading Pay-For-Performance search provider.

Splut is a banner-free directory of UK websites, that take the time to organise all sites in to categorys and subcategories. Finally ordering them alphabetically. The search is particularly fast and because the sites are UK based, the results are more interesting and generally display faster for readers connecting from in the UK.

NationalDirectory was created to excel in the world of search engines. Less spamming, less repeating sites, less dead pages. A clean fine tuned engine for quick access to the information you want when you want it.

ScottishSearch is Scotland's Search Engine, created to fill the void that Scots across the world find when searching large US or UK Search Engines.

Galaxy is the original searchable Internet directory, providing contextually relevant information by integrating state-of-the-art technology with the human touch. Galaxy employs the best of technology and human expertise to organize information in a way that makes it both understandable and highly relevant to users' needs.

Linkcentre The Linkcentre is a fully searchable directory of web sites, created by publishers from around the world and is particularly fast. Within the directory you will find sites relating to Travel, Games, Music, Business and much much more. Simply enter keywords describing the type of site you are looking for in the search box.

MSN UK Microsoft seem to have moved over to their own search engine. This site includes searching all off the Microsoft Network including communities and directories as well as a world wide search of MSN's international sites. In these directories you generally have to choose a category first.

The Open Directory is used by AOL's Netfind, Netscape Netcenter, Dogpile and others. Like Yahoo! but without the pesky adverts and it seems easier to get a listing in it than in Yahoo!. Compiled by volunteers. A vast range of information, organised hierarchically into categories.

Claymont Search Engine is an Internet search tool that uses Web spider technology to download, index and store web pages from the Internet to a search database. The Claymont Search Engine's database contains hundreds of thousands of Web pages from tens of thousands of Web sites.

DirectHit search technology provides highly relevant results for any Internet search. By analyzing the activity of millions of previous Internet searchers, Direct Hit search technology determines the most relevant sites for your search request. Direct Hit empowers millions of Internet users to automatically organize the Internet as they search. Direct Hit search technology is owned by Ask Jeeves, Inc.

InfoSpaceUK The ultimate directory: find people places and things. InfoSpaceUK is revolutionising and expanding the way Internet users find and receive information in the areas of content, commerce, and community.

AnswerSleuth is helping more people with what they want to know today. If there is something you have ever wondered about or always wanted to know, then this is the place to ask. There is a huge searchable directory categorised in a variety of different ways to suit most queries. If you do not find what you are looking for then you can email the AnswerSleuth and get an answer. The last time I looked there were over 91, 000 individual topics.

Search engines have a variety of ways for you to refine and control your searches. Some of them offer menu systems for this. Others require you to use special commands as part of your query.

Search Tips

Choosing the best words for your web searches

Before beginning your search spend some time thinking about what unique words or phrases you would like to see on the web result pages. Try and make your keywords as descriptive and relevant as possible. There are millions of pages on the Internet, and search engines are constantly collecting new information from web sites all over the world. The search engine tries to match your search query (the words you type in) with the text from those web pages it holds in its databases.
The essence of effective searching is in choosing the right keywords. For example, you should expect an extremely large list of sites if you type in "football" and a smaller list if you type in "Brazilian football". Even better would be "Brazilian football clubs" to get really close to what you want. You have to be as specific as possible. Of course, if you were looking for "Daniel Day Lewis" that is pretty specific, but you will get a long list anyway. If the search engine comes back with no results and you have used the best keywords you can think of, check you haven't made a spelling or typing error before you do anything else. The search engine is case insensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower cased.

The phrase search

The search engine on the Virgin Net site automatically prefers pages where the words you have typed in are found close together. However, sometimes the only relevant pages are those where some or all of the query words occur as a phrase.
You can enclose words in double quotes (e.g. "millennium dome") to force words to appear together in all returned pages. Other good examples for this option are "art history" or even "Oxford English Dictionary".

How do I interpret the results?

The first line of the result is the page title. Sometimes, instead of a title there will be a URL. This means that the web page being returned is not yet indexed so its title is unknown. It may also mean that the page's author has not given the page a title. The search engine still knows it's a good match because of other web pages which have been indexed and which have links to the returned page. If the text associated with these links matches the words you have typed in, the page may be returned as a result even though it has not been indexed.
The text below the title is a summary of the result page. The text returned is not necessarily the first text on the page, but is an excerpt of the page that includes one or more of the words you have typed in.

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