A Peek at Search Tools

Infoseek was the most powerful and popular search engine during 1995; however it was a commercial search engine which required a subscription. What made it so popular was their limited version offered up to ten hits at no charge. Infoseek is still very popular, though no longer the most powerful or comprehensive. The charge for unlimited searching has been removed in order to compete and survive. You can't sell what others are giving away free. Infoseek, like the other search engines, now makes its money through advertising.

Lycos is a search engine developed by Carnegie Mellon and has indexed a tremendous amount of information on the World Wide Web. The real power of Lycos searches lies in the use of the Lycos forms search. The forms search allows you to define and focus your search to eliminate many irrelevant hits. We won't be looking at the forms search in this lesson, but you are free to check it out on your own.

Web Crawler is a fast powerful search engine with  an index that is growing rapidly. That statement was as true in 1995 as it is today. When Web Crawler retrieves an item, you are offered a link to the site but are not presented with any additional information that will help you decide whether  the information is useful. Speed has its price.

Yahoo is a hierarchical index rather than a search engine. We covered the differences between a search engine and an index in lesson one. Did you skip that material? Well, if you did, here it is again...

A hierarchial index is similar to an inverted tree. You start by choosing a general topic. That topic branches off into many sub-topics. Each sub-topic branches off into even more specific sub-topics. By following these branches, you  eventually reach an article or specific sources of information.

Unlike search engines, indices are compiled by humans. For this reason, they may lead you to more relevant information, but the trade-off is a much smaller number of the pages  indexed; far less than what you would find in a search engine. In 1996, in order to survive, Yahoo formed an alliance with AltaVista, a major search engine. The result is a search tool providing both index and search engine capabilities.
 

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