Tools with Good Track Records
By Walter Minkel -- School Library Journal, 3/1/1997
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As librarian and search-engine guru Gillian Westera says, "Always use more than one search engine. No one search engine covers the whole of the World Wide Web." The following tools are my favorites.
Basic Engines. For a basic search engine, I strongly recommend both AltaVista and HotBot. AltaVista has a large database, allows full Boolean searching, and is the favorite search engine of most reviewers. I also like HotBot very much, and so do reviewers. HotBot allows you to customize a search by date, format, and type of document, and I've had better luck finding what I want in HotBot than any other engine.
Subject Directories. None are outstanding. Both Yahoo and Magellan are decent in their own ways, but I'm often unable to find anything close to what I'm looking for, and the links I do find are dead frequently enough to drive me nuts. If you have the time and staff (or enough Web-savvy volunteers), create and maintain your own focused directory, or find a nearby library system with a well-maintained directory you canbookmark. A nearby site will have links to worthwhile local and regional web sites, aswell as good sites worldwide.
Metaengines. My favorite metaengine (a Web page that allows you torun the same search in several engines simultaneously) is MetaCrawler. Metaengines can be useful if you're in a hurry and the request is clear, but complex searches that require truncation, wildcards, or Boolean operators are better done one engine at a time. Inference Find is also good and fast.
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