The World Wide Web

Exploring the World-Wide-Web
Search Tools

Finding information on the web can be challenging. The number of web servers and web pages is growing too fast for anyone to measure accurately. It's not uncommon for new users of the web to find its hypertext structure disorienting. When one click can send you anywhere, how can you keep track of where you are, much less get where you want to go?

Fortunately, excellent search tools are available at many web sites. Some, like Yahoo, are similar to a library's card catalog, allowing you to search hierarchical lists of links sorted by subject. Others, like Alta Vista, are indexes you can search with key words.

Keyword searching is a good strategy when you have a specific word or phrase in mind -- for example, the name of an organization or product. Browsing in subject indexes may be the best strategy if you are still figuring out what information you need.

Below are links to a few powerful search tools. These are busy sites, so you might have trouble connecting to them once in a while.

Keyword Searches

Alta Vista

http://altavista.digital.com/
Alta Vista is a huge, fast web index provided as a service to the Internet community by Digital Equipment Corporation. It indexes more than 30 million web pages and 14,000 Usenet news groups.

Lycos Search Form

http://www.lycos.com/
Lycos, started at Carnegie-Mellon, is a robot-compiled, comprehensive index of the World-Wide Web.

MetaCrawler

http://www.metacrawler.com/
MetaCrawler refers your search to seven of the most popular search engines (including Alta Vista and Lycos), then compiles and ranks the results for you. Highly recommended!

Subject Browsing

Yahoo!

http://www.yahoo.com/
You can find almost anything at Yahoo. An excellent hierarchical index makes navigation simple. A perennial favorite.

InfoSeek

http://www.infoseek.com/
Another large and popular subject index.

Excite

http://www.excite.com/
Excite combines keyword searching and subject browsing in a unique and powerful way.

Internet Public Library Reference Center

http://ipl.sils.umich.edu/ref/
Based at the University of Michigan, this project extends the public library model to the web.

Search JVLNET Web Pages and Utilize all of these search engines from one page.