Internet Search Engines

Today hundreds of search engines exist on the web (see the section on Lists of Directories/Engines below). We've tried below to point you to some of the best in each category. Chances are good you'll find what you're looking for with one of these tools.

General Searching

Here are some of the very best general purpose search engines and directories. They are powerful, easy-to-use, extensive and frequently updated. Search engines produce the result of exhaustive automated computer searches, while good directories require painstaking human review and cataloging.

• HotBot Probably the single most powerful search engine, HotBot is a no-frills site, great for detailed queries, and with excellent current news searching. You can easily search by date or by geographic region (e.g. only Southeast Asian sites) or by top-level domain (e.g., search only for ".org" web sites). http://hotbot.lycos.com/
• AltaVista This is the grand-daddy of search engines, always innovating. It is powerful, extremely flexible, fast, and comprehensive. You can quickly do a simple search, or invest some time in learning advanced search syntax. You can tell it to search only for sites in Korean or any of 25 other languages. Also, you might find their Translation feature handy at http://babelfish.altavista.com/translate.dyn -- it gives a quick and dirty translation of web site content to or from English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and Italian. http://altavista.com/
• Yahoo! Currently the best directory on the Internet, Yahoo! is serious about tying to be everything you need. It must hire some of the best reviewers and catalogers in the business; its links are consistently high-quality. It is great source to search for current news items, and its just-for-kids Yahooligians! is lots of fun. http://www.yahoo.com/
• Northern Light A relative new-comer, Northern Light became an instant success, and with good reason. It is well organized -- your returns are grouped by subject, type, source and language. It does a great job of sifting down from the 1000s of hits to the ones you want. You can also search in special collections (including some 3000 periodicals) not generally available on the Web. http://www.northernlight.com/
• Infoseek This is a good all-around site with a simple interface. It has lots of extras including foreign-language searching and searching by geographic region. http://www.go.com/
• Lycos Lycos is an excellent general search site, with good options and a comprehensive directory. http://www.lycos.com/
• Excite Excite gives good results from simple queries and provides lots of other nice touches and features, making it a good choice for less experience users. http://www.excite.com/
• c|net Search http://search.cnet.com/
• LookSmart Designed for families, LookSmart is a directory of frequently updated, staff-reviewed sites. It is a reliable site for high-quality material. http://www.looksmart.com
• Mining Co. Volunteer experts continually search, review, annotate and categorize sites on many topics. http://home.miningco.com/
• Direct Hit compiles its listings by tracking the way search engines are used. The company maintains a database that records the links users click on when sifting through results for a specific search term. Links drawing more clicks rank the highest on search results pages generated by Direct Hit. http://www.directhit.com

Metasearch (Multiple Search)

For simple convenience, you might find metasearching to be the ultimate tool for you. Rather than performing their own original searches, metasearch engines simply compile the results of many other leading search engines all in one place. Thus, with one query you can get a quick overview (though usually not thorough listing) of the matches from several search engines. The better metasearch engines will accept your query and translate it into the required syntax of each of the engines it accesses.

• ProFusion This site has it all: intelligence, design, speed, power and flexibility, producing the best metasearch results on the web. Try the personalized search service: enter your query once and ProFusion with rerun it for you weekly or monthly and e-mail you the results. http://profusion.com
• MetaCrawler An excellent metasearch engine, the standard by which others have historically been measured. It is powerful and flexible, and does a great job of removing duplicates. http://www.metacrawler.com
• Dogpile Dogpile is easy to use and fast, searching a wide range of search engines until it obtains at least ten hits for your query. http://www.dogpile.com
• SavvySearch This site has great flexibility and can be highly customized to fit the needs of the individual user. It handle very complex queries, translating them well for the search engines it accesses. http://dns.uncor.edu/links/sitehelp/localgui/savvybet.htm
• Ask Jeeves One of the newest sites, Ask Jeeves is also one of the most creative. To use it, you type in a natural language question (e.g. "How do I tie a tie?") and Ask Jeeves tries (usually with surprising successes) to interpret your question point you to links it suspects will be helpful -- from AltaVista, Excite, Infosek, Lycos and Webcrawler. http://www.askjeeves.com

Finding People

Need to find someone's address, telephone number or e-mail address? Unless they work pretty hard to hide, you'll probably find them with one of these search engines.

• Four11 This site is probably the best place to start looking for someone. Their SmartName feature will find variations of a given name (e.g. returning Bill for William). They were recently acquired by Yahoo! http://people.yahoo.com/
• InfoSpace InfoSpace includes lots of nice features: dial a phone number, display a map with directions to a street address, or display a local city guide. http://www.infospace.com/_1_4INOUIZ04JUUBPJ__info/index_ppl.htm?
• Worldpages This is the best place to go if you're looking for someone outside the USA, with 230 directories from 100 countries. http://www.worldpages.com/whitepages/
• WhoWhere This site gives you excellent control over your search and return criteria. http://www.whowhere.lycos.com/
• Switchboard A good directory site, but not as comprehensive or well developed as the ones above. http://www.switchboard.com/bin/cgiqa.dll?MG=

Finding Businesses

• BigBook For many people, this will be the best site for finding a business. It is comprehensive and accurate, with good user helps. It does a nice job of proximity searching -- finding the businesses closest to a specified address. Having found an address, you can then link to a map of the area. http://www.bigbook.com
• Switchboard This is an excellent site for finding businesses, with many of the same features as BigBook. http://www.switchboard.com/bin/cgidir.dll?MG=
• Zip2 Zip2 is probably the most enjoyable to use -- it has a nice feel, and gives good results (except it is weak in proximity searching). http://www.zip2.com
• Worldpages Worldpages has helpful maps and lots of useful categories to search. A good site, but not as comprehensive as BigBook or Switchboard. http://www.worldpages.com
• InfoSpace This another good site with features similar to the ones above, but less user-friendly and with less-helpful categories. http://pic2.infospace.com/_1_185412589__info/index_ylw.htm

Usenet Newsgroups

Search engines for Usenet newsgroups, not only current conversations, but extensive archives of newsgroup content.

• Deja News At Deja News you can search for and read messages from more than 50,000 discussion forums, including Usenet newsgroups. You can search messages dating back more than two years, searching by author, date, newsgroup or subject. http://www.dejanews.com/
• Reference.com An excellent site, almost as comprehensive and flexible as Deja News, plus it searches mailing lists. You can ask Reference.com to rerun your search daily and send you updates by e-mail; you can also send it search queries by e-mail. http://www.reference.com
• HotBot Less comprehensive than either of the above, HotBot indexes about 20,000 newsgroups and searches messages up to three weeks old. http://www.hotbot.com/

Christian Search Engines & Directories

The following directories and search engines are focues exclusively on Christian content, so when you do a search you are assured of finding hits on Christian (or religious) web pages only.

• Christianity.Net This is one of the leading search engines for Christian information and resources on the Net. Sponsored by Christianity Today, Inc., it is well executed and professionally run http://www.christianity.net/
• CrossSearch A ministry of Gospel Communications Network, this is perhaps the largest Christian Web site directory. http://www.crosssearch.com
• GoSearch GOSHEN's site includes an extensive Christian Web Directory and search engine. http://www.goshen.net/WebDirectory/
• Great Commission Hosted by SIM, this site lists pages from over 100 Christian mission Web sites. http://www.sim.org
• Religious Resources on the Net This is a comprehensive, searchable database of religious and Christian web sites grouped into over 150 topics. http://www.aphids.com/relres/
• 777.net An extensive directory of Christian resources on the web. http://www.777.net/

Special Interest Sites

While not directories or search engines, per se, we've found these sites to be valuable reference resources.

• WWW Virtual Library http://vlib.org/Overview.html
• Library of Congress Their resources for researchers and information professionals include the catalogs of the (USA) Library of Congress and other libraries, databases on special topics, and other Library of Congress Internet resources http://www.loc.gov/
• United Nations The official United Nations site has UN related databases, documents, services and news from around the world. http://www.un.org/

Lists of Engines/Directories

Want immediate access to lots more search engines? The pages below are links to hundreds of additional search engines and directories.

• Matsuoka's Collection Searching for a particular search engine? You can probably find it in this frequently updated listing of over 200 search engines. http://lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/%7Ematsuoka/search.html
• Beaucoup! Beaucoup has more than 1,000 listings of search engines, directories and indices across the world, grouped in some 20 categories. It can be viewed in English, Dutch, Spanish, German, Japanese and French. http://www.beaucoup.com/
• Internets This site includes access to a huge collection of news sources and archive databases as well as search engines; it starts with a great weather map of the world. http://www.internets.com/

More about Internet Searching

Want to learn more? There's lots of help on the Web, from simple tutorials to indepth analysis of how individual search engines work. Check out the sites below.

• How to Search the Web Terry Gray does a great job of helping us layman get started in effectively using search engines with this 11 page tutorial. http://daphne.palomar.edu/TGSEARCH/
• Search Engines This is a more extensive presentation by Bruce Grossan on search engines: what they are, how they work, and practical suggestions for getting the most out of them. http://www.webreference.com/content/search/
• How Search Engines Work Lots of links to indepth education on the details of how the leading search engines work (part of the Webstep Top 100 site). http://www.mmgco.com/t100links.html

Listing your Site

The flip-side of finding information is making sure your own web site gets found by those you want to find it. The sites noted below will help you get your web pages listed with major search engines and help you understand how search engines build their indices.

• Submit It! The first place to go to quickly, easily submit your site to leading search engines. http://www.submit-it.com
• Webstep Top 100 The most extensive links and helps to getting your Web site widely promoted and listed on search engines. http://www.mmgco.com/top100.html
• TopSites This site features links to the best places that will list your Christan web site for free. http://www.topsites.org

Meta Words

Meta words give you more control over narrowing your search to only those web pages you really want. They require that specified text must appear within specified features of the web site in order to be a hit. To use meta words in your search, enter the meta word followed by a colon followed by the key word desired. For example, entering "title:evangelical" would find all web pages with the word "evangelical" in the title of the web page. We've listed below the more popular meta words and their syntax, along with links to Alta Vista examples using each meta word.

• title:text -- finds pages that contain the specified word or phrase in the page title (which appears in the title bar at the top of the screen in most browsers). Example1 -- title:evangelical -- find pages that contain the word "evangelical" in the title of the web page. Example 2 -- +title:evangelical +title:mission -- find all web pages that contain both the word "evangelical" and the word "mission" in the title of the web page.
• url:text -- finds pages that contain a specific word or phrase in the URL. Example 1 -- url:wheaton.edu -- find all Wheaton College web pages; that is, pages that have "wheaton.edu" in their URL. Example 2 -- +url:wheaton.edu +title:Bible -- find all Wheaton College web pages that have the word "Bible" in their title.
• domain:domainname -- finds pages within a specified Internet domain. Example 1 -- domain:sg -- find all web pages from Singapore. Example 2 -- +domain:sg +title:church -- find all web pages from Singapore that have the word "church" in their title.
• text:text -- finds pages that contain the specified word or phrase in any part of thepage other than an image tag, link or URL. Example 1 -- text:"wall maps" -- find all web pages that contain the phrase "wall maps" somewhere in their text. Example 2 -- +text:"wall maps" +domain:org -- find all non-profit organization web pages (those with a domain of ".org") that contain the phrase "wall maps".
• image:filename -- finds pages that have an image with a specified file name. Example 1 -- image:mosque -- find all web pages that contain an image with the word "mosque" in the file name of the image. Example 2 -- +image:mosque +title:mosque -- find all pages that contain an image file with "mosque" in its name and contain the word "mosque" in the page title.
• link:URLtext -- finds pages that link to a page with the specified URL. Example 1 -- link:brigada.org -- find all pages that contain a link to the missions web site Brigada. Example 2 -- +link:brigada.org +url:gmi.org -- find all GMI web pages that contain a link to Brigada.