Search Tool Name

Function

 

Strengths

Weaknesses

Northern Light

Search Engine

 

·         Sorts your search results into folders, based on their sources making it easier for you to figure out which results you should focus on Twice a winner of PC World Magazine’s Editors’ Choice for Web searching.

·         Provides access to non-Web-based information from over 5,400 business magazines, newswires, and academic journals that you can’t find anywhere else online.

·         Site has SearchAlert, a free service that e-mails you when an item in a category you’ve specified is added to the Northern Light database.

 

·         A Search can return thousands of documents, many of which are of questionable use. Because…

The software "spiders" crawl through the Web collecting and indexing the full text thousands and thousands of pages.

 

About.com

Directory

·         Human editors sift through pages, screening out inappropriate sites and categorize sites by subject. No site is accepted into their portal until it is approved by the editor.

·         Site contains Guides, people who have signed up to take responsibility for a particular subcategory within the site’s 18 major categories.

·        Hundreds of specialized mini-portals provide a great starting point from which to study the entire scope of a subject.

 

About.com has such a wealth of information, it is easy to become distracted from your original quest; it is also not a good site for answering a "closed" question or fact-checking.

 

Alpha Search

Gateway site

·         Narrows the vast amount of information on the Web

·         Surf only this narrowly defined universe for appropriate material

·         Dozens of sites that have valuable information related to your research needs.
Access records using eleven different words or phrases found in the keywords, title words, descriptors, resource type, and discipline fields.

·         The site is actively maintained and organized around a subject, discipline, or idea that supports the research and curricular needs of students and faculty in higher education.

 

·         Not useful if you're looking for a particular piece of data not related to higher education—another search engine is better.

 

Incy Wincy

Invisible Web Directory
  • The Open Directory is a project whose goal is to organize the web by encouraging users to become editors of subject collections.
  • IncyWincy provides access to all the search engines on the Web while also specializing in uncovering invisible or hidden web content.
  • Every week an updated database is available with the latest content from the Open Directory Project. The database is supplemented with information on each site that has forms for searches and other functions
  • They provide all functionality provided by DMOZ Open Directory.
  • The directory can be customized by selecting parts of the directory of interest as navigation starting points, and limiting search results to those areas.
  • They conduct all database maintenance.

 

When running the same search more than once, differing numbers of hits may be returned.

When searching by phrases, some sites are returned with only one word matches

Metacrawler

Metasearch engine

·         Returns results from 13 engines—among them AltaVista, Excite, Google.

·         Purchased by Go2Net, which now uses MetaCrawler's technology to power its searches. When search terms are selected, the query is sent to one of the 13 search engines.

·        Results are compiled from the various sites and presented on one page.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

·         The more engines a metasearcher queries, the longer the search will take. Each time you issue a query, the metasearcher must pass it to the other sites, retrieve the results, and deliver the responses to a single list.

  • As directories are crafted by hand, they are far less comprehensive than search engines.

 

·        Directories are edited by humans, who have sifted through a great deal of junk data; users may find they receive fewer results.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Search Engine Background

 

Search Tool Name

Background

 

Northern Light

·        Search Engine

·        Special Collection of over 7100 full-text publications

·        Organized into Custom Search Folders

·        Over 315 million Web pages

About.com

·        Directory

·        Sites are run by Guides

·        700 Guide sites with 36 channels

·        50,000 subjects

Alpha Search

·        Directory of gateway pages; provides access to a large number of other web sites that (2) are organized around a subject, discipline, or idea, and 3) have been selected and organized by humans (as opposed to computers).

·        An educational tool built for the purpose of academic research

·        Directory of gateway pages

·        Research by subject, discipline or idea—more focused

·        Contains over 800 records

·        Selected and organized by humans

·        Select only 3-5% of all web sites they visit; rigorous standard of quality

IncyWincy   

·        Searchable database directory

·        100,000 databases

Metacrawler

·        Metasearch engine

·        Uses the strength of the Web’s best search engines to search—more efficient

·        Help narrow the search