INTERNET SEARCH TOOLS

Compiled by Frank Stitt MBBS FRACP
Online Medical Education, Sydney, Australia

Internet Search Tools: Metasites

Beaucoup
"billed as the 'ultimate source of free information', this site has subject based, annotated lists of links to search engines including health and sciences; includes a keyword search engine"
DogPile
"a meta-search engine that enables user to customize queries to up to 18 search engines and specialty search sites; includes links to numerous subject categories developed by Dogpile"
Metacrawler
"a tool to 'search the search engines'; this site queries many of the Web's top search engines and retrieves the best search results across the Internet and organizes them in a uniform format, ranking them by relevance."
Perfusion
"site features 'Intelliseek' web search engine that queries over 800 search engines and databases; results note search engine source; users can specify which search engines to include
Pinakes: A Subject Launchpad
"contains links or gateways to fifty plus subject or multi-subject www search engine sites; includes medicine, biology, psychology and veterinary science"
WebPlaces.com
"a comprehensive category listing of links to general and subject related search engines; topics range from computing and software to international and multi-searches"

AltaVista
"searchable World Wide Web index that ranks the sites in each keyword search"
Excite
"keyword and subject information retrieval tool that ranks over 100,000 reviewed Web sites"
Go.com
"keyword and subject directory of the World Wide Web"
Google:
"a search engine that uses a complicated mathematical analysis, calculated on more than a billion hyperlinks on the web, 'to return high-quality search results' that allows Google to estimate the quality, or importance, of every web page it returns"
Hotbot: Search the Net
"keyword and subject directory of the WWW; highly rated search engine"
INFOMINE: Scholarly Internet Resources Collection
"sophisticated keyword search index to 20,000+ "academically valuable resources" including databases, electronic journals, electronic books, bulletin boards, listservs, online library card catalogs, articles and directories of researchers; has "browse" features to author, title, keyword and subject indexes" "keyword and subject directory of the World Wide Web"
Lycos
"catalog of the Internet with subject and keyword access"
WebCrawler Searching
"World Wide Web search tool that indexes by content, titles and www address of sites"
Yahoo!
"searchable, browsable, hierarchical index of the Internet with keyword and/or subject access"

CataList: The Catalog of Listserv Lists
"catalog of public LISTSERV lists on the Internet"
TileNet: Guide to List Servers
"reference to Internet discussion groups (lists) and newsgroups; access via keyword search"