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So which is the best search tool?
There is no answer to this question. As far as the user is concerned the value of the search tool will depend on how comprehensive the search engine has been in generating suitable indexes. It is therefore a matter of investigating which search tools are available and then finding the one most appropriate to your requirements.
Where do you start?
The first site you can look at is one provided by Netscape 
, which rather than being a search engine, has a list of search engines such as GoTo , Looksmart , Ask Jeeves and Google .
Yahoo has links to over half a million sites with entries sorted by category that are searchable. The actual structure is hierarchical menu organised by subject (e.g. Arts, with sub-menus Ceramics, Galleries etc). It is regarded as a very good resource and is an ideal starting point for searching the WWW. Refer to the Yahoo format options in order to gain maximum benefit from your Yahoo queries. There is also an Australian mirror site of Yahoo .
Lycos's search engine explores the WWW daily building an index of all the Web pages it finds. The index is updated weekly and contains document titles, headings, links and keywords.
Excite provides facilities for doing either keyword searches or directory browsing, in a similar fashion to Yahoo. Excite uses Intelligent Concept Extraction (ICE) to find relationships that exist between words and ideas, so search results will contain words related to the concepts for which you're searching. Excite provides facilities for searching the Web, Usenet (newsgroups) and Classifieds, etc. (Excite also has an Australian mirror ).
WebCrawler is another popular search tool. It originated as an experiment in Internet resource discovery at the University of Washington in 1994. The index contains information on over 150,000 different documents that the WebCrawler has explored. The rest of the WebCrawler database (tables of all known, unvisited documents) contains data on over 1.5 million documents. For more information on the WebCrawler refer to the WebCrawler Help page .
One tool that can be useful is Web Ferret . This is a program that can be downloaded It is like an ordinary search engine, type in one or more words, but it then sends that request off to a whole range of traditional search engines, and gives a report containing all the responses. Unlike other search engines, though, it is not able to list responses in "best" order - they are displayed in the order in which the search engines send back their responses.
Other popular search tools include metasearch engines. These are engines that search other search engines. Try Dogpile and AskJeeves .
Or try the Australian Web Wombat
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