Annotated Internet Resouces by Subject

Search Engines

AltaVista - Welcome
This powerful and popular engine searches the Web and Usenet in twenty-five languages.

Ask Jeeves
"With Ask Jeeves, unlike other search engines, users type in a question in plain English and then Ask Jeeves presents a list of matched questions ... After the user selects the closest match, Ask Jeeves takes them directly to a site that was selected by the Ask Jeeves research staff as being an appropriate answer to the question. ... For example, if you ask 'Who is the king of Siam?', Ask Jeeves would respond with "Who is the head of state of Thailand?' When you click on that question, Ask Jeeves takes you to a particular page on a site that answers the question."

Dogpile. All results, no mess
"The Dogpile search interface takes a single line for a query and processes it so that you will get the maximum benefit from your search. Currently twenty-five search engines are supported."

Google
http://www.google.com/
"Google uses a complicated mathematical analysis, calculated on more than a billion hyperlinks on the web, to return high-quality search results so you don't have to sift through junk. This analysis allows Google to estimate the quality, or importance, of every web page it returns." Google is the Reference Department's search engine of choice.

HotBot
One of the newer search engines, HotBot offers much better descriptions of the documents it has found than Altavista.

Mamma: Mother of All Search Engines
"Mamma offers simultaneous coverage of the major search engines in one simple query. Mamma analyses your queries and properly formats the words and syntax for each source it probes. So you no longer have to remember the syntax for each search engine. Mamma will then organize the results into a uniform format, and presents them by relevance and source."

Yahoo!
One of the earlier search engines on the Web, Yahoo is now allied with Altavista. In addition to its engine, it has fourteen topical indices and links to "Yellow Pages," "People Search," "Maps," "Classified," "News," "Stock Quotes" and "Sports Scores."