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Search tools Choose the right search tool for the job! For example...... If you are looking for information only about Australia, use an Australian search engine or directory. If you are looking for current information from newspapers and magazines use the specialised news engines and check directories of online newspapers and journals , rather than searching the whole Internet with a search engine that returns thousands of hits, most of which are not current articles on the topic. Directories Search Engines Multisearch Engines Specialist search engines About.com The Argus Clearinghouse Australian WWW Servers EdNA Internet Public Library Looksmart WWW Virtual Library Yahoo! AAA - Matilda Allthe web AltaVista ANZWERS Excite InfoSeek Lycos Northern Light Web Wombat 37.com All-in-One Search Page AskJeeves Dogpile Find-it Google Internet Sleuth Ithaki Ixquick Kartoo MetaCrawler ProFusion Teoma Vivisimo News search enginesGoogle News Yahoo News AllTheWeb News AltaVista News Country specific search engines Science search engines The Invisible Web - what other engines miss For more information and reviews on different search tools try these links. As the Internet grows so does the number and range of search tools. It is now possible to subscribe to your own personalised subject directory service! There are also a growing number of 'lists of other lists'. These are sometimes referred to as Internet 'portals' or meta-directories. Make the most of the tool you select! For example.....  Directories Search Engines Meta Search Engines Directories Subject Indexes or Subject Directories are created by human beings rather than software programmes. Web sites are organised into categories and subcategories, usually with comments on the contents of the sites. Most provide a searchable index. You can quickly narrow your search by searching only within a specific category, resulting in far fewer but more relevant hits compared to basic searches with a search engine. Always consult any Search Help or FAQs (frequently asked questions) features if searching the index.  Search Engines Search engines create, index and maintain their databases of web sites by automated processes (ie. robots, often referred to as spiders, crawlers  or worms ) rather than people. Search engines vary a great deal in the way they search. Some engines will search for your search terms only in the address or the first twenty lines, others will search the entire text of each site. With a simple search using just one or two search terms you will be presented with literally thousands of 'hits', many of which will be irrelevant. Rather than spend a lot of time sifting through all those hits you should make use of any Search Help, Advanced Search function or FAQs (frequently asked questions) features a search engine provides, when preparing your search query. Alternatively, use a multi-search engine. Multisearch Engines Multisearch engines are useful when a quick, broad search is all that is wanted. They send the query out to multiple search engines at the same time. However the full searching capabilities of the individual engines being accessed may not be utilised by the meta-engine carrying out the overall search and the resulting 'hits' will vary depending on the default search options provided by each engine. Help on Searching & Search Engines Reviews of Search Engines Provides links to numerous descriptive and comparative reviews of search engines. Search Engine Watch (Search Engine News, Tips & More..) Web Search(webreference.com) Web Search (Mining.com) Searching the Internet - Strategies (CSU) A Comparison of Search Engine Features (CSU)