Over the past two months we’ve focused on the strengths and weaknesses of the major search engines. There’s no need to stop there, though. Hundreds of specialized search engines have a home on the Web as do many search engines that conduct searches through several engines simultaneously. You might want to check out the following: o Dogpile – A meta search engine that searches Yahoo!, Lycos’ A2Z, Excite Guide, GoTo.com, PlanetSearch, Thunderstone, What U Seek, Magellan, Lycos, WebCrawler, InfoSeek, Excite & AltaVista, FTP sites and Usenet databases. o Internet Sleuth – Choose from over 1500 searchable databases. o Beaucoup – With links to more than 600 general and specialized search engines, including regional ones and those that help with email addresses, phones and domain names. o MetaFind – Searches through 6 search engines and organizes the results. It retrieves 20 links from AltaVista, 50 from Excite, 25 from Infoseek, 30 from PlanetSearch and 50 from Webcrawler. Supports Boolean queries. o GeoCities – Searches through the personal pages at GeoCities and supports Boolean queries. There’s one thing that’s worth remembering: The search engine you use is only as good as its index AND your query. If you find yourself conducting endless searches with very few results, it’s worth the time to really learn how to craft effective search queries. You can learn how to search the Web with real results. Next week: Spider and Snakes
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