There are 3 basic kinds of engines on the Internet: directories, basic searches, and metasearches.
Here’s what you need to know about them:

• Directories, also known as portals, such as Yahoo!, are primarily organized lists of things rather than an actual searching mechanism. You can find information in portals by making use of the common tree structure, which organizes things incategories, basically from general topics to more specific branches, or subtopics.
• Basic searches, such as HotBot or Alta Vista, are just that--they are that search for, find, organize, and present information to you. Each one has their own methods for doing so and thus results can vary.
• Metasearch engines, like Metacrawler, search the search engines for you; they submit your query to many different engines at once. They work by combining several simple search engines and then taking the highest scoring results from each engine and sorting them by various different methods. Thus you are more likely to get in-depth results with a simple search, whereas with a metasearch, you will see the highest scoring items from several search engines.
• There are also specialty search engines that might be useful for students looking in specific areas such as law, medicine, finance, computers etc...For information on these and other types of search engines, consult www. searchenginewatch.com
  

Exercise To Try:
Experiment with several of the search engines listed below in order to get a sense of how they work. Try choosing a specific term or author's name from our class readings and plug it into each of the engines. Evaluate and compare the results. What does the engine itself tell you about how it sorts and presents information? Which engines gave you the best results? What about the results do you consider useful or reliable?

Search Engines                               Directories                                              Metasearches

www.altavista.com                       www.about.com                                       www.dogpile.com
www.excite.com                           www.dmoz.org (Open Directory)            www.metacrawler.com
www.google.com                         www.looksmart.com                                www.metor.com
www.hotbot.com                          www.lycos.com                                        www.onesearch.com
www.infoseek.go.com                 www.nbci.com (formerly "Snap")            www.search.com
www.northernlight.com               www.yahoo.com                                       www.supercrawler.com