There are three different types of services that offer ways to search the World Wide Web: indexing services (commonly called search engines), directories and meta-indexes.
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There are many different search services which try to index information in pages on the entire Web. Remember that even the largest of the search services is estimated to index barely a third of the total web, so it is a good idea to use more than one service.
The web indexing services use a different searching methodology than you are used to using with library catalogs and periodical indexes. It is called ranked relevance searching. With ranked relevance searching you may get hits that contain only one of your search terms. The best advice here is to use as many terms as you can think of to describe the concept you are searching. You may get a lot more hits but you really only care about the first twenty or so and you want those to be just what you are searching for.
Some popular indexes are:
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Directories Volver a mb111
There are other sites which are large subject directories of pages that the providers find or are submitted to them. The search engines at these sites only search the web pages that are listed in the directory. Some popular ones are:
World Wide Web Virtual Library
Most of the search services also provide subject directories.
Global Searching - Meta-indexes Volver a mb111
Some sites provide the ability to search many indexes and other internet resources from one page. CUSIs (Configurable Unified Search Interface) allow you to choose from a list of search indexes available. SUSIs (Simultaneous Unified Search Interface) searches several indexes of their choice at once.
CUSI
(Configurable Unified Search Interface)
There are many CUSI sites
around the world. Each is set up slightly differently. The common factors
are that you can choose which resources you want to search, they are
sorted by resource type and you do not need to re-enter your search as you
move from resource to resource.
MetaCrawler
SUSI - searches 9
indexes of their choice
ProFusion
SUSI
- Search upto 9 indexes and directories of your choice or have the service
choose 3 for you.
Savvy Search
SUSI - configurable in that you can specify type of information,
number of results and type of query. Will integrate results and drop out
duplicate hits on the same site
W3
Search Engines - the Meta-Index
CUSI - a list of search indexes
sorted by type of index
Search the Library Web
Maintained by: library-www@reed.edu
Reed College Library, Portland, OR
Last Modified: 30 March
1999
URL:
http://simeon.library.reed.edu/resources/search_web.html