2. What kind of search engines or directories should you use?

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Most people are primarily interested in tools for finding information on the World Wide Web. Originally there were two kinds of search services on the Web: directories and engines.

Search directories

Search directories are hierarchical databases with references to websites. The websites that are included are hand picked by living human beings and classified according to the rules of that particular search service.

Yahoo! is the mother of all search directories. However, in order to search the directory you must go to their special directory page.. Their regular search results are not fetched from the directory, but from their search engine.

For obvious reasons we are very fond of the Pandia Plus Directory, which is based on the Open Directory, a catalogue compiled by enthusiasts from all over the world.

Directories are very useful when you have no more than a general notion of what you are looking for.

The first page normally gives you the most general categories (like "Computers and Internet" or "Education"). Click your way down the hierarchy to the right category, select the website you find the most interesting and start reading.

If you use the search form when exploring a directory, remember that you are not searching the text of the actual webpages of a particular site. Instead you are searching the text contained in the site title and the description of the site. These are composed by the directory editors, and are often based on suggestions from the site owners themselves.

In addition most directories will also search the words contained in the category titles or descriptions.

Note, however, that some search directories may add data from regular search engines if they cannot find matches to your query. We will tell you more about this below.

Search engines

Search engines are -- well -- "engines" or "robots" that crawl the Web looking for new webpages. These robots read the webpages and put the text (or parts of the text) into a large database or index that you may access. None of them cover the whole Net, but some of them are quite large.

The major players in this field are Google, Yahoo! Search (which is not the same as the Yahoo! Directory), Bing (formerly Live Search) and Ask.

Search engines should be your first choice when you know exactly what you are looking for. They also cover a much larger part of the Web than the directories.

Metasearch engines

There are also "metasearch" services like Clusty and Dogpile and our own Pandia Metasearch engine. They search several search engines and directories at the same time, trying to extract the most relevant hits from all of them.

You might find it useful to start your searching with one of these, just to get a general feeling for what is out there. The search syntax is problematic, however.

It may vary from search engine to search engine, which means that the metasearch engine has to try to "translate" your query into a language that each search engine will understand. More often than not, they will not try to do so.

For more complex searches, you should go directly to the relevant search engine. Also note that the metasearch engines will give you but a small part of the results from each individual search engine.

The main reason for using metasearch engines today, is that some of them provide special features not found in the regular search engines.

Clusty, for instance, uses a special clustering technology that sorts the results into different groups or "clusters" that might help you pinpoint the right set of web sites more easily.

We have put up a list of metasearch engines at the bottom of our metasearch page.

Specialized search engines

There are also what we call specialized search engines that focus on one type of information. Some of them just presents sub-sets of what is found in the regular search engine results, while others may provide information not found there.

We have listed quite a few specialized search engines over at our Powersearch page.

There are expecially two kinds of specialized search engines you might want to take a look at: news search engines and blog search engines.

The reason for this is that news sites and blog search engines will rank fresh information much higher than the regular search engines. News and blog articles form the most popluar sites and blogs may appear in these search engines less than an hour after they have been published.

So, if you are looking for up to date information on what is happening right now, try search engines like Google News and Google Blog Search. Of these two, Google News works best. Unfortunately so far the various blog search engines haven't managed to handle the spam problem quite well.

You will find a list of news and blog search engine over at the Pandia Newsfinder.

The best search services

Google now indexes billions of webpages

One thing remains true, however: The search engines do not all cover the same parts of the Internet Universe, which gives you every reason to use more than one of them.

At the moment Pandia finds Google to be the best search engines, while the Pandia Plus/Open Directory and Yahoo seem to be the best directories.

For metasearching we recommend Clusty and Ixquick. Then there is the Pandia Metasearch engine, of course.

However, do try the other search services as well! Some of them may be perfect for your needs.

You can find reviews of the best search engines and directories in our resource section, which also presents other search-oriented sites of interest.

Furthermore, you will find links to these and other excellent search services on the Pandia Powersearch page, our all-in-one gateway to the Internet.

And - not to forget - the Pandia Newsfinder has the tools needed for news searching.

Now, let's go to the next part of the search tutorial!

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