Search engines

Beside the most well-kown search engines I found the most at Submit-it. I also used Submit-it to register my homepage free at a number of search engines. While I am preparing this page I'm seeing not so much results. But it seems to be normal that this lasts a while. The information on this page comes partly from Submit-it. Additional information is from test done by Cnet, PC professional and Computer!Totaal.

My favorite search engine is still Altavista. A day after I submitted the URL the page was already indexed. Besides that I noticed that it does not often reindex the site. At Altavista there is not a strict time schedule followed. Instead the webrobot Scooter visits the pages occording to rate they seem to change: a page that is unchanged for a couple of months will be visited less often then a page which is always changed when Altavista checks it out.

By clicking on a logo you get the homepage of the search engine.

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Search engines who find my homepage

Alta Vista is a spider which attempts to index all of the pages on the web.
One of the best things about Alta Vista is that after you've submitted a search, your keywords or phrases remain in the field where you entered them. This makes revising the search easier, because you can see exactly what you've searched for; there's no need to retype your key terms. And the engine provides ample power to help narrow your search. You can use the basic Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT, plus a NEAR directive to specify that words appear in close proximity. Insert a phrase in quotes to require that all the quoted words be directly adjacent to each other. A term prefaced with "+" must be present, and you can use "-" to filter out any results that include a term you don't want. Capitalize words to force case-sensitive searches. There's even more: Alta Vista lets you use additional terms to limit your searches to titles, URLs, links within a document, and the like.

Infoseek also indexes the sites with a spider; they may also choose to review for inclusion under their various topics.

Lycos is well known as an easy-to-use, powerful tool for locating information on the Web which updates its WebGuides several times a day with fresh information and content.
Besides that Lycos offers different areas of interest. Just type in a few keywords, and Lycos returns its results ranked in order of relevance. Lycos not only provides a relevance rating (which ranges from a low of 0.0 to a high of 1.0), but it also indicates how many terms in your search expression were actually matched.
Lycos has a drawback: it excludes certain common "stop" words such as the, and, and new from its searches--and there is no way to get around this limitation.

Yahoo! Inc offers a globally-branded Internet navigational guide to information and entertainment on the web. As the first online guide to the web, Yahoo! is one of the most visible and recognisable names associated with the Internet.
Yahoo has become famous as an all-around index of what's on the Web, and for good reason. It's easy to use and is an unbeatable resource if you have a general idea of what you're looking for and if you want to sort through possibilities listed by category--business, sports, and so forth. If you're in search of highly specific information, though, Yahoo may leave you dissatisfied because it doesn't prioritize results, which means that you may have to wade through dozens of URLs that might or might not contain the detailed information you're looking for.

Mamma is a so-called smart meta search engine. Mamma will analyze your query and properly format the words for each source it probes. Mamma will then organize the results into a uniform format, and presents them by relevance and source.

With over 10 million unique listings, the Four11 Email Directory is the largest such directory offered by any company in the category. Customers can use information such as a person's name, company or organization, city, state, or domain name to find the email addresses of the people they would like to contact.

First Last City State Country SmartName (Bob = Robert)

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More search engines

The German magazine PC Professional thought this was the best search engine. It is fast and with general queries it is successful in finding relevant information. Excite is not very flexible but is surely allround for daily use. The number of pages in the database is 55 million and the update frequency is 1 day to 3 weeks.

The WIRED Search Center

Hotbot is surely one of the better search engines. It has a database of 75 million pages. The hardware consists of 160 Sun Ultra II workstation.
There is a strict menu control. All options are retrievable by dropdown menus. The update frequency varies from 1 day to 2 weeks. It happens very rarely that this search engine refers to a non existing page.

Not one of the best known search engines, but still their database holds 50 million pages. At this search engine 60,000 websites are manually indexed. There is an option to only search this part or the complete database. The functionality is the same as Excite.

Despite some special features Northern Light cannot be recommanded. At peek hours this search engines can keep you waiting for more then 10 seconds. Also the information is not very relevant. An interesting idea however is the display of the search results. These are gathered in folders. The search can then be continued in a folder with the relevant information.
Also interesting is the Special collection that holds one million articles from US magazines, database and books, who are only available from Northern Light. The search is free of cost, retrieving the documents not.

Starting Point is always on the lookout for new sites that offer real value and content for their users.
Submissions are added to their "New Sites" section on the day they are received--in one of their 12 categories. Starting Point categorizes a variety of URLs by subject matter. The interface offers a text box search field and several icons for categories, such as Business, Entertainment, and Sports. (The collection of URLs is clearly less extensive than that provided by Yahoo.)

Click on the graphic to vote for this
page as a Starting Point Hot Site.

The makers of Internet Magazine provide the Internet community with a continuously
updated Global listing service of new Web sites.
Also from the makers of EMAP Computing is What's On.

Webcrawler is strictly a spider; it retrieves and indexes the text of a web page. WebCrawler's interface is simple and offers a minimum of features. You can specify your search terms, ask to see documents containing any or all of the terms, and indicate how long you would like the list of responses to be (10, 25, or 100 hits).