A search engine
is a facility on the Web that allows you to find Web sites by
key word or words. There are two types of search engines: - A directory search engine
organizes listings of Web sites into hierarchical lists.
- A true search engine
uses software agent technologies to search the Web for key
words and places them into indexes.
If you'd like to see a fairly comprehensive list of
search engines, we recommend Netstrider
. Below we've listed just a few of the many search engines
you can find on the Web. Some search engines, such as Ask Jeeves, allow you to enter a
question. For example, you could ask "What's the tallest
mountain in North America?" (don't enter the quotes) Directory search engines, on the other hand, require that you
enter a list of key words. When entering a list of key words, you
can make use of a minus sign (-), plus sign (+), and quotes to
refine your search. For example, if you wanted to find Web sites
with information concerning the Miami Dolphins NFL football team,
you could enter: - "Miami Dolphins"
-- would find only those sites with the two listed key
words in that exact order
- Miami +Dolphins
-- would find only those sites with the two listed key
words regardless of their order
- Miami +Dolphins --mammal
-- would find only those sites with Miami
and Dolphins
as key words and would exclude any site that listed mammal
as a key word
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