Search
Site | Internet | USYD Catalogue

Search Engines

About Search Engines

Search engines use automated programs called robots or spiders to travel from site to site, checking for new Web pages and compiling an index. Some search engines use the full text of each page to put together an index, others just use keywords. When the user enters a keyword or phrase into a search engine, the terms are checked against the index. Search engines often retrieve a large number of results and many of them may be irrelevant. Most search engines have an advanced search option that allows the user to refine their search.

There are search engines specifically designed to search for information within the Australasian domains (.au and .nz), and meta search engines, which allow the user to search many search engines simultaneously.

Examples of Search Engines

• Subject specific search engines
• Australasian search engines
• General search engines
• Meta search engines
• Specialist search engines

Subject specific search engines

Scirus
Scirus is a science search engine produced by Elsevier Science. It indexes scientific, technical and medical information, including both free and access controlled resources, for which either a paid subscription or an online registration is required. Scirus also reads and indexes non-text files such as .pdf and postscript. Check the help files for search tips.

Australian specific search engines

This group of search engines allows the user to search within Australia and/or New Zealand, or worldwide. Where a major search engine has an Australasian version, it has been included in this category and omitted from the general category. It is important to note that some sites providing Australasian information are not hosted within Australia or New Zealand (ie do not have .au or .nz in their URL) so would not be retrieved in this type of restricted search.

AltaVista Australia
AltaVista has a range of advanced searching options which allow the user to refine a search to retrieve less irrelevant hits. The service provides support for multi-lingual searching and also indexes multimedia content. Help information is available on the site.

AltaVista New Zealand
For details please see AltaVista Australia above.

Anzwers
It is possible to restrict a search to web sites within Australia or New Zealand or search anywhere in the world using Anzwers.

Optus Australia
Formerly the Australasian version of Excite, now owned by Optus that allows the user to narrow their search to information hosted within Australia and New Zealand. Fairly basic search options are available.

General Search engines

alltheweb
The producers of alltheweb (also known as Fast) aim to build the "World's biggest search engine by 2003". Various specialised search functions are available at the bottom of the search screen such as options to search for multimedia, WAP, PDA, FTP and MP3 files. An advanced search option is provided and help information is available on the site for more effective searching.

Google
Google is a search engine that makes use of link popularity as a way to rank web sites. This can be helpful when looking for sites in response to general searches such as "cars" or "travel". Google searches for information in a range of file types including .pdf, .ps, .xls, .ppt, .rtf and .txt as well as html sources. It also has a feature that allows translation of Italian, French, Spanish, German and Portuguese web pages into English. An advanced search option and search tips are available.

Hotbot
HotBot offers advanced searching which allows tailoring of searches to retrieve more relevant results.

Netscape Search
Search results are displayed in different sections:

• Partner search results - sites provided by GoTo.com
• Official Web sites, sites that most closely match the search term
• Netcenter pages - tools, services and content within Netcenter
• Web Site Categories - groups of reviewed web sites linked to the Open Directory Project
• Reviewed Web sites - reviewed and categorised by editors

If no results are found within these sections, a search is conducted through Google.General searching tips are available and a Frequently Asked Questions page offers more indepth information.

MSN Search
Results are pulled from a variety of sources, including the LookSmart directory, sites selected by MSN editors, sites crawled by Inktomi, and even the Encarta encyclopedia. This blend gives MSN Search a unique view of the web.

TEOMA
Teoma is a relatively new search engine that was purchased by Ask Jeeves in late 2001. The search results page displays the following 3 choices:

• Web pages grouped by topic
• Web pages (similar to results page from other search engines)
• Experts' Links

Meta search engines

Dogpile
Dogpile sends a search to a customisable list of search engines, directories and specialty search sites. Check the custom search screen for the list of services covered. Help information and advanced search commands are available.

MetaCrawler
MetaCrawler searches a range of the major search engines simultaneously, retrieves search results from across the Internet and organises them in a uniform format, ranks them by relevance and allows the user to access similar sites with a "more like this" option. A Custom search function is available for advanced searching. Check the search tools and tips page for information about searching and customising the service.

Vivisimo
Vivisimo is a new service from a group of computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University that aims "to change the way search results are displayed." Vivísimo does not crawl or index the web, its focus is on organising the outputs of other search engines. It is more properly seen as a clustering engine.

Specialist search engines

Google Scholar
"Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research."

OAIster
OAIster is a project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Services. It aims to "create a collection of freely available, difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources that are easily searchable by anyone". Digital resources include: electronic books, online journals, audio files images, movies, and reference texts.

FaganFinder - Image search engines
Created by Michael Fagan, this website features numerous search tools and external links. Users can search for images, video and audio files.

singingfish
Singingfish is a multimedia search engine. It is designed to track audio and video files. The advanced search option allows the user to search by subject area and/or file type.

Picsearch
Picsearch is a specialised search engine for pictures and images only. The advanced search function allows the user to refine the search by selecting colour or black and white, image or animation, and picture size.

anuvet
A German based veterinary search engine. It features a stanadard and expert search function. The help section gives some useful tips on creating the most effective search stategy.

iSpecies.org
iSpecies.org is a species search engine hosted by the University of Glasgow. It gathers information and images from a variety of sources and works best if scientific name of a species is used.