About Search Engines

A search engine is a program that serves as a tool for finding documents using keywords that you choose. The result of that search gives you links to documents where your keywords are found. There is no one, best search engine. The right one for you will depend on what you need to find. Searches are made by way of programs called "crawlers," "spiders," "robots" or "bots" that scour sites and deliver their finds for indexing.

Search Engine Links

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More About Search Engines and Their Differences

There are big differences among search engines. Each engine draws from source pages that are organized (indexed) differently. The way each engine is designed to produce the best (most relevant) answer link for your search term is also quite different. These differences control the results you get when you search. If one search engine does not produce what you need, try another. You will soon learn more about differences that will help you decide what works well for you. Among other features to consider, a search engine with a large index of source pages and a high rate of good answer (links relevance) is a good prospect.

• GOOGLE:
  A crawler with a huge resource index and a very high relevance rating.
• IXQUICK:
  A meta search engine. These programs send your search to multiple search engines and in turn, combine and filter the information for your results.
• ALTA VISTA:
  A classic crawler with specialty searching features, including video and audio clips as well as news service.
• YAHOO:
  A variant search engine. A Google based crawler also capable of traditional "directory" (human indexed) searches. Yahoo also produces links based on search term categories.
• ALL THE WEB:
  A crawler with a high volume index and an excellent relevance rating. Video clips and other media, FTP files and news stories are also searchable with this engine.
• TEOMA:
  A crawler with a smaller index but exceptional relevance rating. Also enables you to further refine or adjust search terms.
• HOT BOT:
  A very fast and easy multiple search engine without the ability to combine and filter information like a meta searcher.