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Using search engines

Search engines allow the user to search for Internet files or pages by entering keywords that are run against a database. There are three different types of search engines:

standard search engines,
multi-search engines and
subject guides.

Standard search engines use a combination of commands established by the user and/or the search engine to find World Wide Web documents from a database. These match the keywords entered by the searcher. One of the best search engines is the Google at : http://www.google.com

The growth in the number of search engines has led to the development of "meta" search tools that are often referred to as multi-threaded search engines. These search engines allow the user to search multiple databases simultaneously, via a single interface. Dogpile is an example: http://www.dogpile.com

Subject guides are organized indexes of subject categories that allow the Web searcher to browse through lists of Web sites by subject. They are compiled and maintained by people and many include a search engine for searching their own database. The following are two examples:

Yahoo: http://www.yahoo.com.au

Yahooligans (for student users) http://www.yahooligans.com/

Other useful Australian search-engines are:

ANZWERS http://www.anzwers.com.au

WebWombat http://www.webwombat.com.au

EdNA (for Australian education based topics) http://www.edna.edu.au/EdNA/

Pat Pledger
Rick Mobley (Illustrations)
Revised 1/10/2000