Guide to the Internet - My Internet Top 10

The final page of this workshop is a bit tongue-in-cheek. My favourites seem to change on an almost weekly basis. This reflects how quickly the Internet is evolving - so, for this week: -





Google	Google is an astonishing search engine in its ability to find the most relevant hits. It has recently announced an enormously enhanced coverage of the Internet which has leapfrogged it past the other large search engines (AltaVista, HotBot, Northern Light). It includes sites from the Open Directory Project as well, and is gradually building its own web directory. Google wins out on the quality of its ranking algorithm (it ranks pages higher if there are a large number of links from other pages), which usually finds something worth looking at in its first ten choices. The similar pages facility allows 'single click' fine tuning of your search. Google is unique in caching (storing) web pages it has indexed on its own server. As a result, even if the page has moved (a dead link) you can read the original content.	1
Ixquick	The world of metasearch engines is full of rapid change. Ixquick is a relative newcomer which takes much of the work out of searching from you, by interrogating all of the major search engines and then organising the results, whilst eliminating duplicates. To work well the ranking system of the metasearch engine must be of the highest quality, and Ixquick seems to have one of the best around. Truly the Lazy Man's route to quick searching.	2
Yahoo	Yahoo remains the classic human-indexed database, although it has recently received stiff competition from the Open Directory Project. The directory hierarchies are intuitive and simple to navigate, and Yahoo provides a decent search engine to shorten search times. Coverage is excellent (given the limitations of human indexing) albeit with a leaning to the popular. Yahoo now offers additional full text searching capability, using the Google search engine.	3
Northern Light	Northern Light is a major search engine with a strong leaning towards the professional and technical communities. Results are organised into subject folders, making it easy to identify those web pages relevant to your search.	4
AltaVista	AltaVista holds a huge full-text indexed database, and is very fast. It provides a decent directory service now (courtesy of Looksmart) and has a unique translation feature for converting foreign web pages to English. The related pages facility comes in handy when refining your search. Be precise in your search and you will nearly always find something useful. If you are interested in advanced techniques for searching AltaVista provides a masterful tutorial. The Raging.com site is the son of Altavista, with the emphasis on fast (and it is fast!) searching. AltaVista also has a link with Ask Jeeves, and gives the results of a natural language query as well.	5
Open Directory	The Open Directory project is the result of the work of thousands of volunteer editors, co-ordinated by Netscape. It is a fantastic subject directory resource, which is beginning to match that of Yahoo. Look also at the Oingo search engine which provides 'meaning-based' access to the Open Directory and Altavista.	6
Encyclopaedia Britannica	What the Encyclopaedia Britannica offers is its decades of publishing experience and its team of expert reviewers. The site offers two main resources, the entire encyclopaedia online (superb content, excellent layout), and links to web sites reviewed by the Britannica experts.	7
Argus Clearinghouse	Argus Clearinghouse offers excellent lead-ins to major subject areas, particularly in the arts and sciences. it has a clear academic bias, but if you find your subject listed then you have a quick way into the best resources. Its search engine is a bit quirky (read the instructions) and regrettably not all of the pages are up to date, although you can tell this by the date the page was last edited.	8
Dataware	A second metasearch engine worth looking at is Dataware, which combines massive coverage with high quality relevance ranking. The presentation of results isn't quite as slick as Ixquick, but it does use Northern Light in its stable of search engines.	9
Copernicus 2000	'Some days I sits and thinks and some days I just sits' If you're feeling just a bit lazy, then an alternative to using all of these search engines and directories is to run software on your computer to do it for you. Some of this software is even free!! Copernicus accesses the Internet, interrogates several search engines, and presents the results to you as a web page which you can save. Not bad, for one minute's work. Recently Intelliseek have made Bullseye 2 available as freeware. This program offers the opportunity to define the search engines you want, and will search all of the big four (Altavista, Google, Hotbot, Northern Light), as well as the best directories (Yahoo, Open Directory, Looksmart).	10

My Internet Top 10 - General Search Tools