Internet Search Engines

Selected Internet search engines

This page uses tables and forms. If you are not using Netscape or another browser that supports tables and forms, you may find it difficult to read. There is also a text-only version of this page.

This page is getting out of hand. There are now so many search engines that I haven't been able to test them all. As a short cut, I recommend Alta Vista, DejaNews (for Usenet Newsgroup searches only), InfoSeek Guide and Yahoo (for the World Wide Web only).

I also recommend Metacrawler which will search the major engines simultaneously and quickly.

There's a new usenet search engine (Reference.COM) which also allows you to run searches by email at set intervals. It's still in "public beta" and hasn't yet got a huge database, but it looks useful.

A search facility that I haven't seen before and doesn't yet appear below is CUSI (Configurable Unified Search Engine) which describes itself as "a configurable search interface for many searcheable WWW resources. It allows you to quickly check related resources, without having to navigate and re-type the keywords".

The search engines here are listed in alphabetical order and comprise:

All-in-One Search Page. William Cross improves on the Sleuth idea, letting you search many of the same form-based Web databases but all without leaving his page. Query forms are grouped into broad categories such as "Software" and "People": click on the "+" icons to open the different groups and the "-" icons to close them

Alta Vista from Digital claims to be the quickest and most complete search engine, searching both Web pages and Usenet Newsgroups. The advantage of having an unusual name is that I can test search engines by looking for "Hougie". On 19th December, 1995 Alta Vista found all these pages other than the (then recently released) Computer Hardware and Feedback your Comments pages and dated them 13th December. It also found a reference to La Hougie Bie, a prehistoric burial ground on the Island of Jersey of which I had never heard before. Full marks! It now seems pretty up-to-date on Usenet searching as well. There's now a search form below

Apollo Advertising is a database of companies online and links to services, retailers and advertisements. You start by selecting a continent to search on

Architext runs the Excite search system (referred to below) which allows concept-based searches, and allows you then to ask it to find "more like this". It will also group the retrieved records by subject

Awebs (American Web Services) searches Usenet news groups related to web publishing and should therefore be quicker than DejaNews for this sort of technical information

CUI Index from Centre Universitaire d'Informatique at the University of Geneva

DejaNews (a free engine for keyword hunting of current Usenet Newsgroup messages) is great but is not fully up to date. It can even provide an "Author Profile" to show how many postings an individual has made and in which Newsgroups.

Einet Galaxy also offers a Yahoo-like search

Excite allows searches by subject and then provides summaries of each page found

Harvest WWW Home Pages Broker

InfoSeek Guide (formerly InfoSeek Net Search). There's a form below to use this search engine. The text is written by them. Or you can go directly to the InfoSeek Guide Home Page

Inktomi is a new search engine from the University of California, Berkeley that uses parallel processing and claims to offer "the fastest and most comprehensive engine now available to search the World Wide Web". The developers claim that it indexes more documents than Yahoo, Lycos and InfoSeek Net Search and is quicker than all but InfoSeek which is just as fast. There's a search form below

Internet Sleuth: It had to happen: a comprehensive database of Web databases. This search engine generates a list of hyperlinks to other more obscure databases. There are also "Quick Search" queries to Lycos, Yahoo and DejaNews

Jumpstation II is being shut down in December 1995

Lycos is sometimes hard to access and slow. It scores hits based on their probable relevancy to your search and displays them in descending order. Lycos' most practical feature, excerpts from each page's contents with your keywords in bold face, lets you judge quickly the relevance of the page

McKinley's Internet Directory has reviews of the sites it lists with scores out of five

Muscat is an experimental new search engine

NetMall (formerly NetSearch), an American Information Systems' database designed to help you locate companies which maintain a Web presence. Use one simplistic keyword such as HARDWARE or FOOD

Netscape Search

New Riders Official WWW Yellow Pages. There's a search form below

The NLightn Universal Index claims to be the worlds largest index

Open Text Web Index. There's a search form below

SavvySearch is a nifty alternative if Lycos overwhelms you with Web page information: SavvySearch simultaneously queries Lycos, Yahoo and several other engines (including a few that aren't here) and presents the results in a single homogeneous format - terse, one-line hyperlinks. There's also SavvySearch II which is still experimental but looks even better. It searches nineteen (currently) other search engines (including a few that aren't here) and is worth a try

The Spry Internet Wizard (CompuServe) takes your keywords and displays the top 20 matching Web sites. It seems actually to be another front end to Yahoo (see below)

Surfboard is a full-text search and retrieval system [but there no longer seems access to searches using it?]

UK Index is a manually compiled database of UK sites

UK Web Pages

The Virtual Tourist map-based searching. From here you can get to a map of UK university sites

WebCrawler is similar to Yahoo. There's a search form below

The Whole Internet Catalog

The World Wide Web Virtual Library maintained by CERN is the first WWW catalogue

World Wide Web Worm lets you search for Web pages by locating specific hypertext (the blue underlined text), page titles or words within the URL address. There's a search form below

Yahoo, a free commercial offering, searches the listings of a very popular Web browsing tool maintained by real people, but although it can produce many hits on your topic, Yahoo results only contain brief comments on the results. There's a search form below

Alta Vista Search Form

InfoSeek Guide Search Form

Inktomi Search Form

New Riders' WWW Yellow Pages Search Form

...or Search by Category:

Open Text Web Index Search Form

WebCrawler Search Form

World Wide Web Worm Search Form

Yahoo Search Form

See my HTML Authoring page for details on how to register your own pages with some of these search engines.

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This is Andrew's Web Resources - Internet Search Engines Page. For further information, contact me:

by mail at:

by Email at andrew at hougie dot co dot uk

or via the Feedback page.

Comments on these pages via the User Survey page are always welcome.

This page is © 1995-98 Andrew Hougie. The right of Andrew Hougie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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