What Are Web Search Engines?            

Search engines are computer programs that travel the Web, gather the text of Web pages and make it possible to search for them. Please keep in mind that no search engine covers the entire Web. No search engine is completely up-to-date! Search engines are rugged individualists-none of them index the same Web information, and none of them are searched the same way. It is imperative that you take the time to read the help screens before using any search engine.

How Can I learn to Use Search Engines?

Excellent tutorials can be found at:

UC/Berkeley http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/

Recommended Search Engines:

UC/Berkeley http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/SearchEngines.html

AltaVista http://www.altavista.com/

Dogpile http://www.dogpile.com/ A meta search engine that allows users to search more than one search engine simultaneously.

Excite http://www.excite.com/

USA.gov http://www.usa.gov/ Start here when looking for government information.  This is the "official U.S. gateway to all government information."

Google http://www.google.com/ Claims to be the world's largest search engine and is probably the best search engine at this date.

Google Blog Search http://blogsearch.google.com/ Another beta product from our friends at Google, this search engine searches for blogs by subject.

Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com/ Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research.

Google Uncle Sam http://www.google.com/unclesam Searches Web pages of the U.S. government.

HotBot http://www.hotbot.com

MetaCrawler http://www.metacrawler.com/ Another meta search engine.

Science.Gov http://www.science.gov/ Similar to First.gov for searching for government documents, "Science.gov is a gateway to authoritative selected science information provided by U.S. Government agencies, including research and development results."

Scirus http://www.scirus.com/ Scirus is a "comprehensive science-specific search engine available on the Internet."  It does this by focusing on web sites containing scientific information only.  

Vivisimo http://vivisimo.com/ This search engine offers something the others don't---clustering technology "that organizes search results into meaningful categories" listing results by topic and providing sub-topics. 

WebCrawler http://www.webcrawler.com/ 

Yahoo http://search.yahoo.com/ In addition to its well-known directory of web pages by subject, Yahoo Search now offers a Google-like search engine and is particularly good at catching pages that Google misses.