Search smart: Some engines make it easy
If searching through Web pages for information is a frustrating, time-consuming task, you are in good company. A survey published last year by the market research firm IDS shows that 71 percent of Web users say they get frustrated by searching. On average, they give up after 12 minutes of fruitless hunting.
Writing for the tech journal ON Magazine, columnist Jyoti Thottam claims the best search choice is Google. It has the unique feature of caching pages, so even pages that have been taken offline by the creator might still be available on Google. At www.images.google.com you just type in the name, and it shows you a picture of that person.
Google looks at more of the Web than any other search engine, with an index of 1.6 billion Web pages, according to Search Engine Watch, the industry's online bible. The organization named Google the best search engine of 2000.
Other Search Engines
AltaVista: www.altavista.com
Has a Search Assistant that lets you customize your search. It also features a nifty translator called Babelfish. This will allow you to plug in text from one language and get a translation, usually hilarious, into another.
Ixquick: www.ixquick.com
Hunts through 14 different search engines at once, including AltaVista and Yahoo, and ranks results based on how many times they appear in each one's Top 10 results.
Queryserver: www.queryserver.com
Searches up to 10 different search engines at once and organizes results by topic "clusters." It's more difficult to use, say the experts, but very useful for hard-core searches.
Wisenut: www.wisenut.com
Organizes results by how many other pages link to them, but also ranks them by the quality of those links. It claims to have a larger database than Google, and is searchable in different languages. You can set search preferences, including no adult content. It's a little slower than Google, but somewhat more comprehensive.
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