Web Search Engines

- Digital's Alta Vista Search Engine.: Probably the most powerful search engine available. The Alta Vista facility provides access to 30 million pages found on 275,000 servers. Very fast. Indexes everything. Advanced search interface provides full Boolean and Proximity searching.
- Open Text Search Engine: Uses the OpenText Corporation's custom software products. Allows substring searching and weighted searches for increasingly complex search specifications. Data indexed from Web pages, gopher links and FTP files. Database contains full text. Very fast.
- Infoseek Search Engine.: A commercial full-text search service. Uses custom software and database engine. Indexes web pages, newsgroups, and various magazines and newswire services. You'll see this linked from Netscape's search page. True Boolean searches are not supported.
- Webcrawler Search Engine.: Webcrawler uses a web robot to index full text with a simple filtering mechanism. Supports simple Boolean search techniques. The layout and organization of the facility is simple and straightforward. Ideal for new and experienced users.
- World Wide Web Worm Search Engine.: The World Wide Web Worm uses four databases for indexing: citation hypertext, citation URL's, HTML titles, and HTML addresses. No support for advanced searching techniques.

- YAHOO Search Engine & Catalogue - at Stanford.: Hierarchical subject-organized catalogue. One of the most comprehensive facilities in terms of scope and categorization. Basic search capabilities only. Indispensable and easier to access than Lycos, which can be very busy. Probably the best resource of its kind.
- CMU Lycos Search Engine & Catalogue.: Originally created at Carnegie Mellon University. Uses an automated web spider to find new documents. Provides excellent search interface. Simple subject catalogue in 16 major categories. Servers containing millions of unique URLs. Can be heavily loaded.
- Excite Search Engine & Catalogue.: Very large index. Excite uses a custom search engine which supports both keyword and concept-based search techniques. Yields results with an assigned confidence rating. A well-rounded search interface. Most searches completed in 5 - 10 seconds. While the search engine is very powerful indeed, the catalogue facility is not as well-developed.

- DejaNews Research Service: Searches a large collection of indexed USENET News starting with March of 1995. Sophisticated search controls. Extensive archive of articles.
- Search titles in Gopherspace using Veronica.: Completely indexes all the gophers in the world. Be prepared to wait a minute or two for a response. It searches a large dataset. Be prepared to try another Veronica server if the first one is busy.