Directories

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But I thought Yahoo was a search engine? Nope, Yahoo is a directory, or subject catalog. A search engine looks through the text of Web pages, while a directory looks through its own listings of Web sites -- and lets you browse the directory by subject.

Search engines

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Full-text searches of Web pages -- or at least of copies made of some of the Web pages sometime in the past.

Discussion lists

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Discussion lists use E-mail to route messages to people who have signed up for them, by area of interest. The mailing lists are also known as "listservs," for the software that runs many of the lists.

Metasearch engines

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These all-in-one searches, also called metasearches or parallel searches, do not maintain a local database. Instead, they submit your query to several search engines. So they are less than surgical.

Net tools

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Finger, traceroute, ping -- oldies worth being familiar with.

Online services

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The commercial database vendors of newspaper and magazine articles, such as Lexis-Nexis, are moving to the Web. (But they're still not free!) Other new services have sprung up on the Web as well. (Also not free.)

Tutorials

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How-tos on finding info on the Web.

Usenet

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Usenet newsgroups, also called "news" or "network news," are a free-for-all global bulletin board. most internet service providers can keep on hand only a few days of messages. This is where the archives, such as Google's groups, come in.

A tutorial on Web searching: strategy and syntax
A tutorial from Power Reporting. What's the best search engine? The one you learn to use well. Search engines can help you find information on the World Wide Web, but you'll get more chaff than wheat unless you learn general search strategies and the particular search syntax for your favorite search engine.