Seek And Ye Shall Find The Answer

by Don Rittner

If I told you I was going to surf over to a Dogpile and then visit Mamma you would think I visit the Troy Pub too often. Yet those are the names of two of the best Web sites to find information on the Net.

An Internet search engine is a large database of everything in Cyberspace. Most search engines like Yahoo, InfoSeek, and others, send out little robots to find and then index information on Web and FTP sites, Usenet newsgroups, and just about everything else they can find.

Instead of trying to find information haphazardly, you type in various keywords or phrases in a search box. The search engine goes through its database giving you back a list of sites with your keywords or equivalent along with various types of info like the URL (Uniform Resource Locator), a fancy name for a Web address that is linked so you can click and visit, along with a short summary, sometimes a ranking, or even a rating as to the quality of the site.

The problem with stand alone search engines is that not all of them collect and display information the same way, so you usually have to search a few of them before you feel comfortable enough about the results you have. Ideally, it would be nice if you could go to one Web site, type in your keywords, and have it search ALL the various search engines in a uniform way and give you a complete and exhaustive list of hits. This is where Dogpile and Mamma enter the scene. They are known as MetaSearch engines and they differ from regular search engines in several respects.

Meta, (means "more comprehensive" and is Greek for "after") engines send out queries to several databases at once and then give you a list of the results which you can visit by clicking. They do not have their own searchable databases.

This means your search time can be short or lengthy depending on how comprehensive your search criteria is, how busy the individual search engines are, and whether the individual engine is even reachable.

Some stand alone search engines do not allow meta searching at all.

Another disadvantage is that each search engine has its own bells and whistles on how you can search their database. They may allow boolean searching techniques (AND, OR, NOT), searching by phrase only, or access to individual databases (like newsgroups, or FTP sites). Meta engines with their uniform search query do not always reach all these possibilities.

Also, meta engines will often only grab the top ten hits that meet your search criteria, and that all important hit could be number 11 (Murphy’s Law of Computing).

Yet, Meta engines are good starting points to begin your search. Once you become familiar with the search engines each of them query, you can view it as a preliminary search. Then you can do a more thorough search on the individual engines that you feel gave the most promising results.

Here are a few of my favorite MetaSearch Engines to get you started:

1Blink

http://www.1blink.com/

OneBlink searches Infoseek, Euroseek, Excite, Alta Vista, Yahoo, Lycos, Hotbot, Planet Search, and Thunderstone. You can also search newswires and newsgroups separately. You can launch their Rover which is a small search window that stays on your desktop while you surf. Need to find something, just type in a keyword.

Cyber411

http://cyber411.com/

Cyber411 searches up to 16 of the most popular search engines at the same time: AltaVista, DejaNews, Excite, Galaxy, Goto, HotBot, LookSmart, Lycos, Magellan, PlanetSearch, Search.com, Snap, Thunderstone, WebCrawler, What-U-Seek, and Yahoo. Simply enter your query string once and C4 does the rest. Unlike some of the others, C4 takes your query and reformulates it to fit the syntax of each search engine and the results are gathered, duplicate URLs are removed and the results displayed as they are received from the engines.

Dogpile

http://www.dogpile.com/

Dogpile, one of my very favorites, lets you search all their databases at once or individually. Dogpile searches LookSmart, GoTo.com, Thunderstone, Yahoo!, Dogpile Open Directory, About.com, Lycos' Top 5%, InfoSeek, Direct Hit, Lycos and AltaVista. It also searches the Usenet databases Reference, Dejanews (including their old archives, and AltaVista. Looking for software? It searches FAST FTP Search. Additional searches to Yahoo News Headlines and Infoseek NewsWires; BizNews; Stock Quotes; Weather (enter city, state or enter zipcode); Yellow Pages and White Pages; and it even prepares maps (enter street address, city, state).

Mamma

http://www.mamma.com/

Mamma searches About.com, GoTo.com, Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Webcrawler, Looksmart, Hotbot, and Altavista search engines. Simply type in your keyword or phrase. You can individually search the Web, stocks, newsgroups, White and Yellow pages, or e-commerce sites.

MetaSearch

http://www.metasearch.com/

You can receive up 500 hits at a time on MetaSearch, one of the first Meta engines. MetaSearch checks Alta Vista, Infoseek, Lycos, Webcrawler, and Tradewave. It presents to you individual search windows for each engine.. Your output can be set to give you just a bit of info or more detailed.

Savvysearch

Savvy checks Yahoo!, Top 5%, Surf Point, Snap, Magellan, GoTo, eBlast, About.com, LookSmart, Clearinghouse, PlanetSearch, Open Directory, RealNames, Lycos, WebCrawler, Google, All The Web, Thunderstone, Infoseek, Direct Hit, HotBot, Excite, Galaxy, AltaVista, and NationalDirectory . It also has several categories including MP3 or e commerce sites that you can search individually. You can search by phrase or boolean. For Mac users there is a Sherlock Plug-In you can download.

Reach Don at drittner@aol.com, or 251 River Street, Historic Troy.