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.

Ahoy! The Homepage Finder
Attempts to find a person's Web page.

AllTheWeb
The closest competitor to Google. Now searches the full text of Adobe Acrobat's PDF files on the Web, unlike Google, which is searching only the first part of the files.

AltaVista Advanced
A large database and powerful syntax for narrowing your search, if you use the advanced search page. Full text of copies of more than 100 million Web pages. Con: No relevancy ranking. Did you know that AltaVista also searches Usenet newsgroups? (Though Deja.com is better.) Just change from "the Web" to "Usenet" on the search page.

Excite
Pro: Has great maps. Allows searching Web or Usenet by keyword. Con: No phrase searching. No date restrictions. No Usenet searching. Tip: Try its http://www.excite.com/search/options.html?a-opt-t (advanced search).

Excite
Another search engine that is morphing into a directory into a portal. Eveyone wants to be Yahoo, but Excite's search engine still is useful.

Fast Search
A new search engine. Comments?

Full-text search of SEC documents at FreeEDGAR
This useful service allows one to search for any text string in documents that companies file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Limited ability to sort results.

GO Network
A search engine (Infoseek) that wants to be a Yahoo clone, with a Web directory and links to many useful services. Owned by Infoseek Corp. and incorporates the old Infoseek directory.

Google
The search engine of choice of most journalists. Results based on relevancy and popularity. Factors in the number of links from other pages to the pages that it lists for you. And weights pages by the proximity of your search terms to each other on the page. It doesn't allow the precision searching of AltaVista; it just reads your mind. (But when will it learn to use OR correctly, or the wildcard *...)

HotBot
Pro: A large database and powerful syntax, similar to AltaVista's. Includes more than 110 million Web pages, and many archived mailing lists. Tip: Try its "more search options" to use Boolean operators to narrow your search. Specialty: Allows searches for

Lycos
Pro: Good for finding pictures or sounds. Searches keywords, titles, headings and links of Web pages. Con: Will not search for specific words or phrases. No date restrictions. No Usenet searching. Try the advanced search.

Lycos in Spanish
A new Spanish language Lycos.

Medical World Search
A search engine for medical information.

Northern Light
Not currently open to the public, but coming back. The old description: Smartly evaluates and organizes your search results by source or subject. This gives you a more orderly set of results if you blindly search for a name or phrase. New forms allow you to narrow your search by industry or site types. The search syntax is not so powerful as on AltaVista, but the results grouped into folders may make up for it.

Quepasa.com
Spanish language search engine and directory of Web sites.

Robot-based Search Engines
If you really want a detailed description of how search engines work.

RocketNews
A search engine for current news headlines. Save your searches to be reissued. Search from today or go back one, two, even five days.

Search IQ
Reviews of major search engines, and a directory of specialized search engines. Also daily tips and tutorials.

Singingfish Multimedia Search
A multimedia search engine - searching Real, Windows, Quicktime and MP3 files and streams. Updated continuously, so contains breaking news streams as well as an archive of news, movies, sports, tv, radio, finance, etc.

The Chocolate Lovers' Page
The chocolate search engine. No kidding.