SEARCH ENGINES

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One of the biggest challenges on the Worldwide Web is finding something specific. There's a lot of information (most of it junk) out there. This page should help you find what you are looking for.
In general: Put quotation marks around an item to request an exact match (e.g., "two or more words").
Use a + to include an item, or a - to exclude it (e.g., Who + "rock band").
Use asterisks to search with wildcards (e.g., "*bert" yields "dilbert" and "albert")

Not all Search Engines are of equal value (the listings with "***" were selected best by readers of PC Magazine, 12/2/97).

Some of the links listed below are really front ends that allow the searching of multiple engines with one entry (Metasearches). Each Search Engine contacted by a Metasearch may have some unique search requirements for narrowing a search, therefore, a "front-end-search" of multiple engines allows only for the most general of searches.

For useful information about the different types of search engines (see below), and instructions for using search engines, check out Search Engine Watch.

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General Search Engines

Alta Vista American Universities EINet Galaxy Excite! HotBot *** Infoseek LookSmart Lycos AstaLaVista   Lycos

Northern Light Open Text Index PlanetSearch Reference Shelf Reference Works Search.Com WebCrawler Yahoo ***  WWW Worm    Filez

 
 
 
 
 

PEOPLE FINDERS

Bigfoot Four11 *** InfoSpace  White Pages

Switchboard WhoWhere? Worldpages  Email Finder

 
 
 
 
 

BUSINESS FINDERS

BigBook ***  InfoSpace Netscape Guide

Switchboard Worldpages Zip2

 
 
 
 
 

USENET SEARCH

Alta Vista Deja News ***

HotBot Reference.COM

 
 
 
 
 

METASEARCH (search multiple sites)

All4One Search Machine All-in-One Search Page Ask Jeeves Cyber 411 Dogpile Highway 61 Internet Sleuth Mamma Search Spaniel

MetaCrawler *** Netscape's Searchable Index NLightN Point ProFusion *** SavvySearch Unified Search Engine for InTernet W3 Search Engines  Splat Search Engine