Internet Search

If you're trying to find a particular page on the Internet, you can use one of the many available online Search Engines. These search engines allow you to search for information in many different ways -- some engines search titles or headers of documents on the net, others search the documents themselves, still others just search other indexes or directories.

For every case, we'll cite a sample search thet provides some guidence about each engine's effectiveness.



Search Engines

The Lycos Home Page: Hunting WWW Information
This search engine, served by Carnegie Mellon University, will allow you to search on document titles and content. Their June-September, 1994 database contains 547,675 unique documents.

In a test case, Lycos found 300 documents about the topic "surf," and also found 1,359 documents containing words like "surface," "surfer," etc. The Lycos index is built by a Web crawler that can bring in 5,000 documents per day. The index searches document title, headings, links, and keywords it locates in these documents.

WebCrawler Searching
This engine allows search by document title and content. It is part of the WebCrawler project, managed by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington, which collects documents from the Web. Webcrawler's search found 266 documents containing the word "surf."

Query Interface to the WWW Home Pages Broker.
The Harvest Information Discovery and Access System builds indexes that you can search using this search document. It also searches content and document titles and found 166 documents containing "surf".

Centre Universitaire d'Informatique World Wide Web catalog
Also known as the CUI W3 catalog (University of Geneva, Switzerland), this searches through directories (summaries) of other Web documents. CUI W3 found 150+ summaries including "surf," "surface," "surfers" and other matches.

The JumpStation Search Page
WWW Nomad
This is an Internet resource discovery written by Rockwell Network Systems that searches only through document titles. Nomad found 7 documents matching "surf."

ALIWEB
The Archie-Like Indexing for the Web is part of the Web at Nexor, in the United Kingdom. Their database is a collection of document summaries written by their publishers and regularly collected by ALIWEB. ALIWEB located four documents whose keywords included "surfaces."

WWWW - World Wide Web Worm
Developed by Oliver McBryan, WWWW pours over the information in the Web and builds an index of titles and locations (URLs). WWWW found 8 documents with "surf" or "surface" in their titles.

ArchiePlexForm
Published by NASA, this is useful for searching for files on the network using file names and wildcards. A warning: Archie searches can take a long time.

Search Engine Search

If you still haven't found what you're looking for and you'd like to try out other available search engines, check out these other lists of search engines:

W3 Search Engines
This one is published by the University of Geneva.

CUSI
Nexor also offers this search tool which can help you find software indexes, people indexes, dictionaries, and other things.
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Copyright © 1994 Mosaic Communications Corporation.