Search the Internet

• AltaVista, a product of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), creates complete indexes of every word on every Web page or Usenet newsgroup it encounters, allowing you to make highly targeted searches. Digital claims that Alta Vista is the fastest and most precise information agent on the Web. Alta Vista searches by keywords, which it derives from the text of a Web page. It claims to index over 30 million pages found on over 600,000 servers, as well as millions of articles from Usenet. Alta Vista updates its information constantly and each page returned from the search is given a date and time from Alta Vista's most recent update.

• An interesting feature of Excite is its "Confidence Rating", a percentage rating given to each of the results it returns; a higher percentage indicates a closer match to your original query. In addition, Excite gives you the option to view more documents similar to those described in that particular result. A new feature of Excite are so-called channels, which are groupings of websites according to categories, such as News, Sports and Shopping. Finally, Excite is available in a number of languages.

• InfoSeek searches by keywords, scanning the information in its database. With InfoSeek, you can search a variety of databases, including the Web, Usenet, and E-mail addresses. InfoSeek gives a score to your search results and returns the "best" matches to your query. InfoSeek also groups websites into categories, similar to Excite.

Search the Web for:

• Lycos is a web-indexing robot. That means Lycos software robots actually go out and travel the Internet every day looking for new Web, Gopher and FTP sites. Lycos searches by keywords, assigning a percentage rating for relevancy of each search return. Lycos has jumped on the channel bandwagon, offering listings grouped by category. An interesting feature of this search engine is the ability to locate pictures and sounds on the Web.

• Magellan, a subsidiary of Excite, has a database of thousands of websites that have been reviewed and rated by their editorial staff. You can search just the reviewed sites or the entire Web. When you do a keyword search, you are presented with a list of results each of which is described in a one paragraph summary. Magellan, like most of its fellow search engines, groups sites into categories, such as Health, Hobbies and Investing.

• WebCrawler searches for documents within a website that match your search terms, not just websites as a whole. While directories such as Yahoo! refer you to sites that cover the category subject you are interested in, WebCrawler searches the contents of pages within a site, for a match with the search terms you entered, even if the site itself is unrelated to what you are searching for. It builds an impressively complete index and does a good job of sorting the documents it finds according to how closely they match your search terms. However, because it indexes the contents of documents, it may also find many links that you're NOT interested in.

Search for:

• Yahoo!, one of the most popular hierarchical directories, is a good starting point. You can search by subject, or like the other search engines, you can specify a search term. Yahoo works well if you're searching for general information on a subject, but because of the way information is indexed in Yahoo, you probably won't get great results if you're looking for something specific.