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There are, in addition to search engines, also a number of web directories. Directories are metalists of sites collected on a page. The best known directory is Yahoo. They are generally arranged in general categories (Arts & Humanities, Business & News, Computers & Internet, etc.) allowing you to move through a series of links that represent more and more specific subcategories (for example, Arts & Humanities: Literature: Authors: American: Herman Melville) to narrow down a search to a specific page.
It is important to differentiate between this type of resource and a search engine. Search engines actually send out robots (or spiders) that map web sites and gather information about those sites to list in the engine. Thus, they potentially can find anything on the internet. They then categorize this information by keywords and the title of the page and sometimes by the first 25 words or so on a page. Directories on the other hand are static. They do not search anything. Web page publishers submit their sites to these directories and the site is then sometimes reviewed and listed in the directory. Thus, not everything on the world wide web is listed in every directory.
To learn more about the way that specific search engines work (and thus use the engine more useful to the job you are doing) take a look at some of these helpful sites:
Introduction
to Search Engines--a reference librarian reviews the seven major search
engines in terms of scope, interface, logic, and results. A handy chart
compares the features.
Top Internet Searching
Resources Reviewed
How
to Choose the Search Tools You Need
UCB Library
Internet Search Tool Details
Tips
on Popular Search Engines
Some of the more popular search engines are located at:
www.altavista.digital.com
www.webcrawler.com
www.infoseek.com
Some of the more popular directories are:
www.yahoo.com
www.lycos.com
http://www.mckinley.com/--home
of the Magellan directory
There are some interesting engines that respond to particular questions as well. These engines are relatively limited though and tend to only deal well with general sorts of questions (for example, What is Existentialism? is more easily answered then What day was Flannery O'Connor born on?). One example of this type of engine is:
One other engine is worth mentioning here, since many of these engines and directories have no arbitration on them, the sites they pull up are generally not evaluated in terms of credibility or validity. There is a site called the Librarian's Index to the Internet in which librarians evaluate the websites listed there. It is located at:
sunsite.berkeley.edu/InternetIndex/
With this idea in mind, that some web resources do have some professionals
aiding in their design, we can move on to some of the other web resources
available for research that are generally more credible and lead to more
of what we may consider to be more credible information.
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