Search Engines

A search engine is the software that searches for a topic of your choice and returns matches. Search engine is often used synonymously with spider and index. A spider or web crawler is the software that scans documents and adds them to a search engine's index by following links. A directory, on the other hand, is a subject listing of web sites which is compiled by a human editor who classifies web sites by subject.

Google
Yahoo
MSN Search
Google Scholar
AOL Search
Ask Jeeves
Overture

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Descriptions of Individual Search Engines

Google
http://www.google.com/

Google is a search engine that makes heavy use of link popularity as a primary way to rank web sites. This can be especially helpful in finding good sites in response to general searches such as "cars" and "travel," because users across the web have in essence voted for good sites by linking to them.

Yahoo
http://www.yahoo.com/

Like Google, Yahoo is another favorite among researchers due to its large index of the web and many power searching features. Yahoo! Search Technology (YST) works night and day scouring billions of documents on the Internet to give you the most comprehensive, up to date, and relevant search experience.

Yahoo! Search provides quick, intuitive access to the wide variety of information available on the Web. Each time you search, Yahoo! Search Technology instantly scans through its comprehensive database of web pages, determines the comparative relevancy to your search query, and offers these web pages as ranked results.

YST ranks web pages according to their relevance to a particular query by analyzing document features, including text, title and description accuracy, source, associated links, and other unique document characteristics. A single search gives you immediate results from a database that is updated daily to capture newly created and changing pages, including late breaking news and timely events.

MSN Search
http://search.msn.com/

Microsoft's MSN Search service is a LookSmart-powered directory of web sites, with secondary results that come from AltaVista. RealNames and Direct Hit data is also made available.

Google Scholar
http://scholar.google.com

Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, thesis, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers. professional societies, preprint respositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available in all subjects across the web.

AOL Search
http://search.aol.com/aolcom/index.jsp

AOL search works with the following different catagories:
Recommended Sites
Recommended Sites are listings that have been selected by AOL editors. These include results that point to relevant AOL and AOL Partner content. They may also include Official Sites (web links displayed when the search term is an exact match of a known trademark or brand name), and other sites closely related to your search term.

Sponsored Links - Content
"Sponsored Links" are listings that have been purchased by companies that want to have their sites appear for specific search terms and related content. These listings are administered, sorted and maintained by third parties and not endorsed by AOL.

Matching Sites
These results may contain objectionable material not endorsed by AOL. Matching Sites are Web sites, listed in order of relevance (listings with the highest relevance appear first). These listings are administered, sorted and maintained by Google, AOL's search partner. For information about how Google sorts these listings, go to http://www.google.com/about.html and click on the "Our Technology" link. In addition, news stories related to your search may appear in the listings. These results are supplied by CNN, an AOL/Time Warner company.

Find it in <city, state>
"Find it in" provides a link to listings in the AOL Yellow Pages that match your search term and are in your local area.

AOL Yellow Pages Results
Provides listings from the AOL Yellow Pages that match your search term and are in your local area. These listings may include paid placements, clearly labled as "sponsor". For information on paid placement in the AOL Yellow Pages, go to http://www.aolyellowpages.com/advertisers.

Browse by Category
"Browse by Category" features titles of Web site categories relevant to your search term. You can click on any of these links to find a list of sites specifically related to that topic.

Image Search Results
Image Search results are images sorted by relevance (images with the highest relevance appear first). These listings are administered, sorted, and maintained by Google (AOL's search partner). The results you see with this feature may contain mature content. Google considers a number of factors when determining whether an image is relevant to your search request. Because these methods are not entirely foolproof, it's possible some inappropriate pictures may be included among the images you see.

Image/Audio/Video/News Results
The Image/Audio/Video/News Results layers are made up of the top results obtained from Audio/Video, Image and News Search tabs.

Ask Jeeves
http://www.ask.com/

Northern Light is another favorite search engine among researchers. It features one of the largest indexes of the web, along with the ability to cluster documents by topic. Northern Light also has a set of "special collection" documents that are not readily accessible to search engine spiders. There are documents from thousands of sources, including newswires, magazines and databases.

Overture
http://www.content.overture.com/d/

Overture Performance Marketing, announced the launch of Search Optimizer, an enhanced campaign optimization product designed to help users maximize the effectiveness of their Overture sponsored search campaigns. The launch of Search Optimizer, now available in the U.S., demonstrates Overture's ongoing commitment to generating greater value for its users by providing them with simplified search management solutions and valuable insights to better inform their research decision-making process.