WWW Search Sites

 Did you know that there are over 50 million Web pages on the Internet? The problem is finding the page that you want. To help you, certain nice people have set up search pages. What happens is that you go to these pages and fill in some sort of form on the Web page by typing in keywords of topics that interest you. Then you click on a button on the page ( it may be labelled Search, Submit, Go or anything else, just look for a button). Finally, after a short pause (network permitting) you get back a page or more of links to pages related to your keywords. Sound simple doesn't it? Well, you should know by now that this is the world of the computer and in this world, nothing is simple (sounds of groans, gnashing of teeth etc.). There is a small problem in that some search sites are better than others. Some people prefer one search page while other people think another search page is the best thing since sliced bread. So I've written this page which is a brief guide to what I think are the best search pages. You may disagree with my opinion but here are my favourite search sites, for what its worth.
How to these search pages work?
Well, do you really want to know. REALLY? OK, the short answer is that they work by magic. That's all you need to know. But, if you really want the long answer, here it comes. There are two main types of search site. Both types set up huge indexes which relate keywords to pages on the World Wide Web. They differ in how they obtain their information. The first type, such as Alta Vista, attempt to index all of the pages in the world. This is done automatically using something called a spider. Spiders are sort of electronic robots which roam about the Internet, looking for World Wide Web pages. When a spider finds a page, it reads it, finds any interesting keywords and takes this information back home with it to be indexed. The second type of search page only lists selected sites. Yahoo is an example of this. This type of search page is more like a catalogue. If you have written some World Wide Web pages, you can submit them to these type of search sites for indexing.

Alta Vista

Holds one of the biggest (if not the biggest) list of links to other pages. It's fast and I like it although some people find that it gives too much information to be useful. Watch out for the numbers at the bottom of each search page. Clicking on each one of the numbers will take you to another page in your search list. Oh, and the nice people at New Scientist like it as well. What can I say?

Yahoo

Yippee for Yahoo. Number 2 on my list of best search pages. Again, this search page lists a lot of things but you can narrow down the search quickly by restricting it to just certain topics. Beware however, as you can miss things by doing this.

Lycos

Well, I used to use it a lot but its got slow as more people use it. Maybe, they should buy a bigger computer

Point

Brought to you by the makers of Lycos. It deals with only the top 5 percent of all Web sites. Yes, but it chooses what the top 5 percent are, so again you could miss something important.
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