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How should I Ask Jeeves? or Google a Hotbot?
Yahoo!
| There are a lot of
search engines, whose job is to create and maintain databases of all the millions of
websites and their contents... |
When you and I type in a
few keywords and click on "Search" or "Find" (or in the case of
Dogpile, "Fetch"), these databases are interrogated and a list of websites
presented to you which contain the keywords you typed in. |
Many of these Search
Engines are "true" search engines with their own databases, but some so-called
Search Engines (called meta-search engines or meta-crawlers) present you with
results which have been created by the "true" engines.
The good news is that meta-crawlers apply your keywords to several "true"
search engines at a time. |
| Some search engine
companies are related to others - for example look at the web address of
"Hotbot" - and note it says "Lycos" (another search engine
company) in the middle of it! |
But we are all busy
people, and many of us only view the top 20 results before moving on. How many of us have the time and patience to look at the "next
20 results", or the 20 after that? |
Search engines try to
rank websites they find containing your keywords into some sort of order, but use
different methods of to do this. Some count how many times your keywords occur, others how near the
top of the webpage your keywords are, others check how many websites have links to
them. So search engines will often display similar results, arranged in a different order. |
Some commonly used search engines are:
So what can we conclude?
 | Popularity of the Internet has created a problem -
finding what you want from the loads of stuff out there!
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| Search Engines are an essential tool in finding
what you want, but must be used wisely. There are several, but they deliver fairly
similar results.
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| So choose just two or three search engines -
there's no need to look at them all.
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| The Internet is global!
Remember many sites of interest may be American or Australian, or whatever... Some
search engines let you limit searching to UK websites, which is fine if you're hoping to
visit a shop, but advice and information can come from anywhere, can't it!
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| Bookmark your favourite Search Engines (i.e. put
them in your Favourites list) so you can get back to them easily next time.
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| Search Engine databases are not static, they are
regularly updated, so the same search next week or next month may yield some new entries
of interest! So keep looking!
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 Happy
Searching!
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