Search Engines

General Purpose Search Engines

Google -- very fast, clean, my favorite. Has cached pages. You can check links via the link: prefix. For example, link:http://personal.ecu.edu/wuenschk/anosmia.htm.

Google-Scholar -- Restrict your search to scholarly literature.

Google-ECU -- Restrict your search to pages at East Carolina University.

Google-Specific University -- Restrict your search to pages at a particular university.

Google News Search -- search a variety of Internet news sources for articles appearing in the last week.

MSN Search -- pretty good, includes access to Encarta encyclopedia

Exalead -- full featured advanced search, including proximity searching (words close to one another in any order)

AllTheWeb -- Overture Services, same firm that now runs AltaVista

Lycos -- sites sorted by popularity

Yahoo -- a popular engine, but does not appeal much to me.

MetaSearch Engines

Vivisimo -- convenient scrolling through results, organizes results into hierarchy of folders.

Ixquick -- lets you select which engines are employed.

Dogpile -- sort by relevance or by search engine. Run by InfoSpace, same as MetaCrawler.

Image Search Engines

Ditto.com Visual Search Engine

Google Image Search Engine

Information on Search Engines

Search Engine Watch -- information on search engines for web masters and consumers

Google is so damn good that I almost never use any other search engine. Here are some tips on making Google even more useful.

Click on the preferences link and change the default way Google operates.
If you have been getting too many hits to pages in languages you do not read, select the "Search only for pages written in these languages" and then select the languages you want.
If you find that your search terms lead you to inappropriate sexually explicit pages, click on "Use strict filtering." I once searched for "how to spray paint a car" and all but one of the hits pointed to web pages that functioned as porno-redirectors - these pages have a bunch of common search target phrases, but you never see them because when you point there you are immediately redirected to multiple porn sites, which then immediately attempt to download scumware to your computer. Changing from the default filtering to strict filtering eliminated this problem for me.
Increase the number of results per page. The page will load slightly slower, but you will save time going from page to page. I set this to 50 results.
Tell Google to open search results in a new window. This saves a lot of time, especially when on dialup - you don't have to back up to the list of hits, just close the window for the currently viewed hit, or leave it open (if it is of interest) and click on the search window.

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Contact Information for the Webmaster,
Dr. Karl L. Wuensch

This page most recently revised on 28. May 2005.