Useful Links

 AltaVista

AltaVista is one of the big four. Full text indexing, very fast and a unique translation facility. Be precise in your search and you will nearly always find something useful. The Altavista tutorial on advanced searching is masterful.
Altavista has recently started the Raging.com site with the emphasis on fast searching.

Argus Clearinghouse is a directory resource with a clear academic bias - arts and sciences. It is a top resource in these subject areas.
The search engine has some odd quirks (such as using AND as the default, except when the search query uses truncation, when it is OR).

Ask Jeeves is one of the best engines at handling plain English queries. The site editors have built up a special database of questions, with links to the relevant sites. It is one of the first engines I turn to if I just want a simple factual question answered.

The Dataware metasearch engine provides results from three full-text indexed engines (Altavista, Hotbot, Northern Light) one keyword indexed engine (Excite) and two major directories (Magellan and Yahoo).is is the text associated with Dataware. It allows you to choose the maximum hits per engine. The results presentation lacks the clarity of Ixquick, but the quality of resources found is just as good.

Dogpile is a metasearch engine provided by the Go2Net consortium, which also has Metacrawler.
If you don't mind cookies, it is possible for you to specify the order in which it searches other engines. One useful combination is to put Google first, followed by two directories, Yahoo and Looksmart, and then Altavista. Unfortunately Dogpile does not collate the results and remove duplicates as some of the other metasearch engines do.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica on line, together with sites reviewed by the Britannica experts. The web pages are a model of clarity.

Good for concept searches, because of its keyword indexing Excite also has an inbuilt thesaurus and looks for ideas linked to the words in the query.

My number one search engine recommendation. It has recently expanded its database, and is currently the largest. Where Google scores is in its ranking algorithm, which will normally produce some excellent resources in the first ten pages listed.
The similar pages facility allows you to home in on your subject with just a single click.

The U.S. government has taken the lead in providing a consumer gateway to health and human services information. The sites which Healthfinder links to are U.S. government agencies, national voluntary, nonprofit, professional organizations serving the public interest and educational institutions.
The UK is hoping to put something similar together when its Electronic Library for Health gets going.

One of the big four search engines, Hotbot has a good directory service as well. It is one of the sites to search if you trying to be fairly comprehensive in your searching.

The Infind metasearch engine is accessible via the Inference Find site, or at www.infind .com. It searches four engines (Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos, WebCrawler) and two directories (InfoSeek,Yahoo).
It organises results by topic, and by type of site, useful if you want educational rather than commercial sites, for example.

The Go directory is the best part of the Infoseek site. Web page coverage is not massive. Use mainly for concept searches, because of good directory.

As its name suggests, the Internet Public Library is constructed along the lines of a public library, with browsing possible using the Dewey classification, alphabetically, or by doing a text search. Access to several thousand books on-line.

This metasearch engine searches two of the big full text indexed search engines (Altavista, Hotbot), Excite (keyword indexed) as well as three major directory sites (Yahoo, Looksmart, Infoseek). The coverage is therefore pretty good, and Ixquick ranks the results with a star rating, depending on the number of engines which have found the same site. It's major disadvantage is that it only selects the top 10 results from each site. This is a quick metasearch engine with good presentation of the results.

Librarians Index to the Internet is a decent directory service with a simple, standard interface.

Lycos has got left behind in the Internet dominance stakes, and its search engine is not first choice, unless for software downlads.

A search engine which aims to 'help users sift through the ever growing amounts of data of/on/about or in any way regarding, the health sciences'. Too often there are no hits, making MedWebPlus, as yet, only a moderately useful resource.

Northern Light is a major search engine with a strong leaning towards the professional and technical community. Results are organised into subject folders, making it easy to identify those web pages relevant to your search.

Oingo parses each search statement and attempts to identify the meaning of the query. The Oingo Lexicon is used to cross-reference words. The search results are taken from the excellent Open Directory Project and AltaVista. An excellent engine for a concept search.

The Open Directory seems to have acquired a huge momentum with its army of volunteer editors. The result rivals Yahoo. The Oingo search engine is an excellent way to access Open Directory resources.

Simpli.com attempts to provide meaning-based searching - you enter text in one box, and before initiating a search it provides you with a drop-box choice of the concepts which it thinks you might want. Once you have confirmed the correct concept it will initiate a search.
Simpli needs to increase its coverage of the Internet, and hopefully its recent acquisition by NetZero will provide the financial muscle to do this.

Virtual People provides a range of interesting specialty search engines.

Now part of the Excite stable, Webcrawler is one of the older search engines. It is no longer one of the top search engines, and its directory service is second rate.

The most popular search destination on the web is still Yahoo. People find the directory system intuitive and simple to navigate, sith the added bonus of a reasonable search facility. Now being challenged by the Open Directory project, but still holding on as the top directory site.

Any metasearch engine which manages to use Altavista, Google,  Hotbot, Northern Light, Fast, Excite, Open Directory and Yahoo is going to be interesting. Results are well presented, and the 'powersearch' interface is easy to use. An excellent metasearch tool.

 Argus Clearinghouse

 Ask Jeeves

 Dataware

 Dogpile

 Encyclopaedia Britannica

 Excite

 Google

 HealthFinder

 HotBot

 Inference Find

 Infoseek

 Internet Public Library

 Ixquick

 Librarians Index to the Internet

 Lycos Pro

 MedWebPlus

 Northern Light

 Oingo

 Open Directory

 Simpli

 VirtualPeople

 WebCrawler

 Yahoo

 Zworks