Freedom isKnowledge
Search Engines
Your research is only as good as your search - Webmaster
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Search Engines continue to evolve and are updated with new features and capabilities. While it is important for a search engine to be up to date on as many Internet addresses as possible, it is equally important that the information it retrieves for you is "gleaned" out of the maze of information on the Internet. To have a search engine find 37,152 sites that are similar to your search request . . . with 2,071 being potentially matched for your review . . . can be overwhelming. But if the search engine you have selected hits the top ten on its first download, you may not need to look at the other 2,061 sites. And in the process, you may have found the search engine that works for you most of the time.
Some search engines will come up with categories before showing you specific sites. For example, if you type in "jobs," it may come up with different categories of jobs--engineering, marketing, sales, etc. Clicking on the category will reveal related sites that have registered their internet address with the search engine.
Here are a few sample classic engines that are still being used along with some news ones. However, see our note after this list where we provide links for over 40 Job Search Engines and dozens of other search engines available on the Web linked from our homepage:
www.lycos.com (classic engine)
An older but excellent search engine, covers a broad range of web sites in which its creator claims to be 75% of the web. Its Advanced search mode can narrow your search to an exact or almost exact match of your typed-in search words.
http://wc3.webcrawler.com (classic engine)
Webcrawler, one of the earlier search engines, makes available a full menu of terms that allow you to instruct its engine on how to proceed with the search. Besides the usual Boolean options of AND, OR and NOT, Webcrawler allows you to specify how many words can come between two words you typed in for the search by allowing you to add the word NEAR/(# of words). This allows you to search for areas that might be discussed in a variety of ways.
Google is probably the largest search engine covering over 30 million pages on hundreds of thousands of servers. Google also has other search sites for the Google News and the Google Groups. Add your URL to Google by clicking here. Also chick on our link on the homepage titled "Gaggle of Search Engines" for all the Google Search engines, around a dozen or so.
www.flipdog.com - (not to be confused with Dogpile.com and their "Go Fetch.".)
Flipdog.com takes search engines to new heights providing you e-mails on new jobs that have been published to their site that match up to three of your resume configurations. They also allow you to create several resumes along with a cover letter. When you apply for a position, your main resume and the cover letter copy come up, allowing you to edit them for the position you are applying for, and then send them. Of course, networking still beats everything.
HotBot will allow you to search not only on words but on phrases. In addition, it allows you to refine your search using a modify button, indicating that the search MUST, SHOULD or MUST NOT contain certain terms. Hotbots's search is also sensitive to updated sites--allowing searches to eliminate sites that have not changed over a certain period of time.
Excite not only searches sites but provides actual website reviews posted by journalists. Excite also covers Newsgroups including the classified section of ads. Here you can find jobs and other related information. When you find an exact match on Excite, Excite allows you to Query-by-Example--that is find other sites similar to the one that was just downloaded to your computer.
"Located in Sunnyvale, California, Yahoo! Inc. offers a branded internet navigational service that is among the most widely-used guides to information and discovery on the World Wide Web. Yahoo! provides a context-based directory structure for Web resources, as well as a Web-wide search engine that is seamlessly integrated with the Yahoo! directory service.
There are of course many more search engines avilable on the Web. Go now to our homepage and click on two major links there. One is titled "Gaggle of Search Engines" and the other "Job Search" (not Job Research, or you'll come back here.)