TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
In a message dated 98-07-06 13:18:22 EDT, lystad -at- LYNDEN -dot- COM writes:
<< You could always try www.dogpile.com. It uses all the major search
engines simultaneously: Lycos, yahoo, altavista, etc. It sorts
the matches by search engine, giving you the option of pursuing
the thread in one search engine or another, or all of them if you
prefer. >>
As a librarian, I was taught never to use Meta engines for searches because
the formulas that the individual search engines use are so different that
you will hardly ever get what you want to get. (Then again I was trained to
get the most specific information possible, and to avoid the general.)
Also the original poster asked about how search engines formulate their
searches. Here is a quote from my search engine training manual "Many
search engines use automated tools to gather resources. These tools, often
referred to as worms, spiders, crawlers, or robots, search thousands of
Internet sites, collect information and store the information in a
database."
The formulas that these search engines use to rank and retrieve data are
closely guarded secrets.
Here is a summary of what I was taught about search engines:
Yahoo--King of the directories, and best used to search for broad subjects
AltaVista--Can find obscure things, brings back most hits. For the keyboard
inclined, as opposed to mouse inclined.
Excite--Uses a combination thesaurus/search engine, which it calls ICE
(intelligent concept extraction.) As Excite indexes pages, it learns what
words are related to other words. For example if you were searching for
"technical writing" it would know that "computer documentation" is a related
term and find pages about this topic even though you didn't use either word
in your description. It is more descriptive and ranks by percentage, but is
not as exhaustive as AltaVista.
HotBot--Has the best search form on the first page. It is exhaustive like
Alta Vista and more for the mouse inclined. It also allows 100 results to
be displayed at one time--the most of any search engine.
InfoSeek--You can narrow your search within the original search with their
pipeline feature, which is unique. You narrow your search results by
inserting a pipeline between the two words you are searching. Infoseek
then searches for one word, and then--within that set of results--for
another word. For example, if you searched cars|Saturns, Infoseek would
first search for all the pages referring to cars--and then, within that car
search would look for Saturns.
Lycos--Best for road maps, city guides, people find, and finding pictures on
the web.
