| Information
need |
Characteristics
of the search engine |
| I have an
general idea of a broad topic and want to narrow it. |
(Yahoo) organizes
information as "subject trees" from general to specific topics. Northern Lights dynamically groups
results into folders of related hits to help you narrow your query. |
| I want a small number of relevant hits
and an idea of what's in each document before I go to each page. |
(Excite) hits
have excellent summaries. When you find a relevant hit, you can submit a "more
documents like this one" to locate similar pages. |
| I want to overview multiple engines together
to get an idea of what's available for my topic. |
(Inference
Find) performs parallel searches, merges results, removes redundancies, clusters the
results Dogpile can be customized
to exclude particular search engines, or search them in a certain order |
| I want quality, evaluated sites that have reviews and
ratings because I have limited time. |
(Magellan)
smaller database containing descriptive reviews of sites (Lycos TOP 5% Home) reviews and rates the
"Top 5%"
(WebCrawler) smaller database with relevancy
ranking |
| I need to do
a pinpoint search because my terms are narrow. |
(Alta Vista) massive
and fast indexer of full text, good for very specific searches |
| Is there
an encyclopedia of information on the Internet? |
(Information Please) searches Information
Please Almanac, Entertainment Almanac and Sports Almanac, the Columbia
Encyclopedia, and the Random House College Dictionary. (Free Internet Encyclopedia) The
MacroReference of the contains references to large areas of knowledge and FAQs; The
MicroReference contains short bits of information and references to specific
subjects. |
| I have common keywords that probably appear in many documents
and should make my search specific. |
(HotBot)
fast, powerful, with ranked results and many options for defining a search |
| I
have common keywords in a phrase like New
in New Orleans or A in Vitamin A that cannot be ignored. |
(Infoseek)
includes words in a phrase that other engines ignore |
| I know the date of an event and am looking for more
information. |
(Hot
Bot Super Search) limits by date |
| I need programming language (e.g. JavaScript, ShockWave)
web pages or information. |
(HotBot
Super Search) limits by programming language |
| I need
balanced information from verified sources for a
school research project to take home. |
(Nueva's Library catalog) has
resources collected for the school's curriculum ProQuest Direct has full text of over
450 magazines and newspapers |
| I need scientific information to back up the research
for my science fair project. |
(Alta Vista) rated best for finding scientific
information on the Internet in research
study. |
| I need mathematics or statistics
information. |
(MathSearch) locates material
concerned with research-level and university mathematics |
| I can
describe my topic in a sentence (natural language). |
(Infoseek)
(Ask Jeeves!) allow natural language searches |
| I need
information on a proper name (a place, person, or
object). |
(Alta Vista) (Infoseek) use capital letters to force an exact case
match on the entire word (HotBot) person search
will retrieve the name in both reversed and normal order (e.g. Picasso,
Pablo and Pablo Picasso) |
| I want web
pages from a geographic region |
(MetaCrawler) can search by
continent |
| I want web
pages from an Internet domain (e.g.schools)
|
(HotBot
Super Search) can search by Internet domain (e.g. edu, com) |
| I want to
search for images and sounds (photos,
art, designs, logos, videos, music, noises), media types (Java, VRML) or file
extensions (.gif ) |
(Columbia University's WebSEEk) (AltaVista Photo Finder) (Lycos Media)
(HotBot:
SuperSearch)
(The Amazing Picture Machine)
(Yahoo!
Computers and Internet:Multimedia:Pictures)
Arriba Vista |
| I need a quotation. |
(The Quotations Page) (Bartlett)
(Land of Quotes) |
| I want to get
advice and opinions from others. |
(Reference.COM)
(Deja News) searchs archives of Usenet
posts (strong in computers, the Internet, science, recreational activities,
sociology, psychology, k12 education)
Join a discusion group on a topic (Liszt) |
| I bet this search has been done before. |
(Ask
Jeeves!) has prepared answers to common questions. |
| I want to browse. |
(A2Z)(Yahoo) are subject tree directories with short
descriptions of sites |
| I want to see sites just for kids. |
Yahooligans! |