Navigational Aids
As the Web grows exponentially, finding your way around is becoming increasingly difficult. Many services have
sprung up to address this very complex problem, each using a slightly different approach. There is no comprehensive
registry of sites on the Internet nor a standard way of documenting the contents of a site (yet).
Search engines that focus on UK or European information sources
- UK Academic Directory - a directory of UK academic sites with links to
various search services.
- EuroFerret - The EuroFerret search engine claims to be popular
amongst students as it gives a Europe-wide view of the web, rather than one that is predominantly American. It
claims, too, to be very easy for untrained users to get to grips with.
- UK Plus - a search engine specializing in the UK portion of the Web.
- Mirago - The objective of Mirago is to view the Internet from a UK perspective.
As well as indexing all UK and Irish sites that it knows about, it also indexes International sites which are of
interest to residents of the British Isles, in areas such as Entertainment, Media, Software, Medicine and General
Reference. This approach is claimed to provide Mirago users with geographically more relevant search results.
Other Search engines
- Alta Vista Claims to be the largest Web Index available, also offers
a search and download facility for Usenet.
- Google - a search engine that does just that, search. Unlike many other
engines this one doesn't try to be a portal to everything else. A fast and effective search tool.
- Lycos The Lycos WWW search tool at Carnegie Mellon - very useful.
- Infoseek The Infoseek search service - fast and comprehensive.
- Yahoo One of the best of the "index of indexes" catalogues.
- Northern Light Search - described by some as the best tool for
advanced searches. It also categorizes the results into pseudo-folders.
- AskJeeves - Ask Jeeves! offers a very fast (surprisingly so) search
service and an unusual interface. It searches several of the main Internet search engines simultaneously.
- Excite Another popular search service.
- HotBot The first commercial application of Inktomi's
parallel-processing technology offered in conjunction with HotWired online magazine.
- Dogpile Despite its name, this is a useful search tool, as it will simultaneously
search over 20 other well-known Internet search engines.
- Netguide Live - Your daily guide to the Net. It claims to have reviewed
and rated 50,000 Internet sites.
- Galaxy A useful commercially operated index.
- CUSI (Configurable Unified Search Engine) an interface for other searchable
WWW resources.
- Magellan - McKinley's Internet Directory Its claim to fame is its use
of real people to review the sites included in its directory. Sites are given a star rating. For example,
this site received a rating of three (out of four).
- Webcrawler Searching
- AliWeb
- Internet Meta-Index
- Netskills (UK) - a collection of search mechanisms.