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Search Tools

AJKids.com - Ask Jeeves for Kids

Essentially a semi-structured search tool for elementary and middle school students and their teachers, students "Ask Jeeves" questions about school subjects, locating articles or images, etc. A window allows visitors to see a sample of the questions being asked, generally concisely posed. It is powerful but uneven in pulling in results, best with simple requests like help with history facts or polygons, where it often produces a list of both information and homework help. There's also a news page and a "fun & games" page with connect-the-dots and other activities which are engaging and perhaps a meaningful way to help some special-needs children (for example with fine-motor skill deficits or test responding difficulties).

All4One Metasearch

From SearchAllinOne, a new metasearch tool which quickly indexes most of the non-Google search engines and produces a main results page along with a list of key words or phrases on a left-hand sidebar. The only pet peeve thus far (4/05): the option for "translation" not only does NOT provide translation of results, or even a translation option (such as Babel), but takes one to Alta Vista's page for multi-lingual searches, a bit tedious (you need to begin again and are limited now to AltaVista) and not useful after the search has already taken place. Aside from that: A decent, effective meta-search tool.

AllTheWeb.com
"All the Web, All the Time" is their motto, and they do serve up a good bit of the web, quickly and reliably. A new hybrid between Fastsearch and the DMOZ open directory, it's almost scary how deep into a website their robot indexes! Also features related topic directories at the top organizing indexed pages about the subject of the search term. I entered my own name and found psychology articles, organizations, and windmills of Zaanse Schans as the categories about my web pages! Very interesting.... (11/01) [6/17/02: Fast's AlltheWeb claims to have displaced Google as "World's Largest Search Engine"]

Alta Vista
A great place to start, and one of the oldest and biggest engines, they are now self-described as "the most powerful and useful guide to the net". Fast, thorough, family-friendly. Offers translation, too.

ClicKey
Here's a useful search tool which only lists top-level domains (not each individual web page on a site or bulletin board which could have thousands of individual pages).

For a Quick Search Enter Keywords

Dogpile
Now owned by Infospace, this long-popular meta-search tool combs several major engines and produces an organized and comprehensive list of results. Using a simple interface, Dogpile claims to be the easiest tool with "the best results".

Find What?
Lots of things can be found by this relative newcomer onto the search scene. Fast and clean, this engine features a "preview" mode which allows you to check out a find in a new window without leaving their search page. "Uneven" - 8/2000

Google
Very fast, with many results. Also features a "feeling lucky" option which takes you right to the page it thinks you'll like best.

HotBot
"Have you driven Inktomi lately? Very sleek and fast. Gets you where you want!" (1997). Still true, now under the stewardship of Wired. Comparable to Snap.com's Inktomi-driven engine. Hotbot no longer lists the various search engines from which they cull their list, as do some "meta" search tools.

How to Choose a Search Engine or Directory
From the University of Albany Libraries, a very nice presentation of the various search engines available for custom searching for information, specific sites or phrases, music, images, and more.

Infoseek/Ultraseek

An "intelligent" search tool with several useful features. (Now part of Go.com)

Ivy's Search Engine Resources for Kids
As the name says, some search tools oriented towards children's sites and interests. Family-friendly.

Ixquick
Now here's a search tool which found me, and I'm glad it did! Very fast and multi-lingual, now self described as "the world's most powerful meta-search engine". Try it!

Kart00

A multi-lingual, multi-channel, multi-media search experience unlike any other! Three years in the making, this site uses a "cartographic interface" which presents search results in colorful spatial style, almost resembling a space map, and sure to appeal to right-brain processors and those who want to interact more directly with an intuitive, incredible, and very cool search tool.

LYCOS Search Engine
One of the (still barely) independent search engines, this is the competition for Alta Vista. Check this out after you've gone through Yahoo! and Alta Vista. "OK engine, but it's translation feature (entire sites) is the best". (8/2000)

Meta Crawler with Java
"Quick and pretty" (1997). Still true. Now part of Go2Net, this remains a true meta-search engine, which displays a list of engines which are canvassed, and annotates each listing with the source.

Overture
This (are you taking notes?) is the former GoTo.com search engine, whose recent motto was: "Search Performance". Supplying the engine for several other search tools now, it's fast and offers a combination of paid and unpaid listings. The results are displayed as top-level domains even when individual pages on the site are located. Less clutter, less info. (1-2002)
Wait! Now it's part of Yahoo! This engine is getting lots of attention, for whatever reason, be it business acquisition or technology. (2004) "Overture products are now Yahoo! Search Marketing products."(3-2007)

Search.com
Oops. I blinked. What was Savvy-Search apparently is no more. Now a smooth metasearch engine run by our portal friends at C|Net. Seems ok so far.... (and getting better in 2001)

Search Engine Watch
Industry-standard reference for what is happening in the land of the search engine market.

Snap.com
After earlier incarnations of being "powered by Inktomi" and Global Brain, then swallowed up by by NBCi "powered by Dogpile", Snap.com re-emerged in 10/2004 as a very different site, with a new look and feel. " 'It's going to be controversial, but it's awesome,' proclaimed founder Bill Gross.... Visit the site, and below the standard blank search box is a list of the Web's most popular search destinations, by number of searches: eBay, Google, Yahoo and so on. Start typing something in, however, and the menu morphs with each keystroke (think of the global directory in your office e-mail), continually narrowing itself until one search term�the one you've typed in�remains. Hit enter and get your results." - Fortune.com, May 4, 2005

Teaching Tools
Here's a directory of exceptional online resources for K-12 classroom teachers and school-based educational and mental health professionals. Lesson plans, virtual field trips, inter-school competitions, Internet libraries, museums and more. Fascinating adventures for both teachers and learners. (Fenichel)

Teoma.com
A cross between a 3-dimensional artificial intellence model (like KartOO) and the more traditional, linear text and list.(2001) Update: 2/2006 saw Teoma become subsumed under the Ask search tool, formerly Ask Jeeves; the butler has now been retired. [3/07] The form below now leads to Ask.com .

VIRTUAL REFERENCE DESK - "Search Engine Secrets of the Pros"

Way Back Machine
A great resource for those who are looking for a specific web page at a particular point of Internet history, from 1996 until now. From a database of over 30 billion cached web pages... "The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public." [Source]

Web Crawler 2002
WebCrawler

Here's one of the original Internet Search Engines, now claiming to be faster than ever.
(Actually, it is very fast and very current, but the page descriptions can be extracted from the text a bit choppily.) 2007: Now part of Infospace!

Yahoo!
I see teachers advising their K-8 students to use this directory/search tool. Yahoo! is very good for finding things by general category. It's increasingly commercially oriented, and tends to produce a few big sites very reliably. For educational research (as opposed to consumer research), some of the other search engines (notably AllTheWeb and Google) may work better when looking for a fairly narrow subject. Yahoo! was one one of the first search tools on the Internet, and is changing constantly!

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