World Wide Web Resources

 A Selective List for the Evaluation of Internet Resources

• Distinguishing Scholarly Journals from Other Periodicals
• How to Critically Analyze Information Sources
• Deep Content: Guide to Effective Searching of the Internet
• Why It's a Good Idea to Evaluate Web Sources

Selected WWW Search Engines

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One of the three largest search engines. AltaVista allows both simple (single word) and complex (multiple word & boolian searches) searches. This allows you to find very specific sites (e.g. Emile Durkheim on Suicide). PC Magazine rates AltaVista below HotBot for complex searching.

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Excite is a good choice for the less experienced user, as well as offering good returns on simple searches. Not recommended by PC Magazine, however, for advanced searches or current news queries. On simple searches you can use Boolean operators (and, or, not, etc.) and natural language. Its News Search provides access to Web versions of newspapers, magazines, and news wires.

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Google is the only search engine that provides access to pages at the time they were indexed, designated as "cached" pages. It also offers one of the best relevance ranking criteria.

Hotbot

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HotBot comes highly recommended with an easy to use format and excellent current news search capabilities. This search engine rates well against othesr in its ability to accurately accomplish simple searches, customized searches, and directory searches. HotBot displays results with title, relevancy ranking, summary, and date that it was  found.

LycosPro (advanced)

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Lycos has been rated by PC magazine as the search site with the most potential. Lycos offers numerous search options, a large, organized directory, and produces good returns on simple searches. Frawback: it produces multiple links from the same site. Both regular Lycos and Lycos Pro display the title, an extract, and the URL

MetaCrawler is the very best site for simple to moderate complex searches. Ease of use, exceptionally organization, and in depth results make MetaCrawler a superior  meta-search site. Queries up to 15 other search engines, organizes the results into a uniform format, ranks them by relevance.

SearchEDU offers results ranking and page caching to an extensive index of over 20 million pages of academic materials from universities, schools, and libraries.

Teoma offers a raft of useful options in its advanced search page. You can limit by domain, website or geographic region, such as Oceania; force the inclusion or exclusion of specific words or phrases, or specify where on the page your search terms should appear.

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WebCrawler's best feature is its Web shortcuts, leading one to other specific hits from your searching parameters. Interface is similar to Excite's. It is also one of the better sites for current news.

Evaluating Search Engines

Revised: 12/07/04