Search the World Wide Web

AllTheWeb
Searches more than 2 billion documents and integrates these documents with breaking news and hundreds of millions of multimedia, video, MP3, and software files within a single search page.

Alta Vista
Offers simple and advanced searching. Gives users immediate access to the most relevant information including Web pages, multimedia files, up-to-the minute news, products and services, and a free language translation service with Babel Fish.

Excite
Searches full text of over 55 million Web pages. The hit display includes title, URL, brief summary and confidence level with results shown in decreasing order of confidence. Directory of Web sites by category also offered.

Google
Google is a librarians' favorite. The simple screen is deceptive; it searches more than 2 billion web pages. The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button takes users immediately to the most relevant site. Google's cached web offers an opportunity to see older web pages that match a search. This is handy when pages will not display because a server is down.

HotBot
Searches full-text of more than 110 million documents, which are sorted according to relevance. HotBot searches are case-sensitive if any letter in the search string is capitalized. In such searches, results will match the search string letter for letter. On the other hand, if all letters in the search string are lowercase, HotBot will ignore capitalization in returning search results.

LookSmart
Access 1.8 million URLs which are organized into more than 170,000 categories. The "Find Articles" link allows searchers to access over 300 magazines and journals, full-text and free, dating back to 1998.

Northern Light
Searches the World Wide Web and information from 5,400 premium sources. Web results are combined with information from premium material in one search, giving you access to books, magazines, databases, and newswires not available from any other search engine. There is a fee for premium material, or what Northern Light calls their Special Collection. Currently the Special Collection contains 7 million full-text documents. Most documents range in price from $1.00 to $4.00 per article.

Web Crawler
Searches full text of over 2 million Web pages. Simple searching only. Displays results in either a short or detailed form. The short form gives either the title, or if a site did not provide one, the URL. The detailed format provides titles plus summaries, URLs, numerical relevancy scores and the option of viewing similar pages. Acquired by Excite, Inc. in 1996.

Yahoo
One of the most popular search tools on the Web. Offers an extensive directory of Web sites by category with simple searching of the sites within the directory. Over half a million sites are divided into more than 25,000 categories.

The following megasearch tools allow you to search several search engines at once.