SEARCHING THE WEB by David Bryant
Even the largest search engines only index a small proportion of the web (around 10%) and there are certain kinds of files that most search engines simply don't read, including PDF, Word and Excel files. Search engines cannot index dynamic pages produced from databases in response to a request, such as LDS Family Search results pages. Moreover, search engines do not explore and index parts of the web where many sites of interest to genealogists may be found. They index commercial over educational sites, US over European, and 'popular' sites over the lesser known. Many of the larger search engines now use the Google search process so if you don't find what you want on Google (or it may be too deeply buried in a very large number of results) you may not achieve any better results on other common search engines.
The best general search engines (just click on the underlined Title)
GOOGLE uses +, -, " ", OR, ( )
FAST uses AND, OR, ANDNOT +, ( ), -, " "
Other search engines:
About Academic Info Accufind All4one All-in-One AllTheWeb
Alta Vista redirects to nz.altavista.com
Ask Jeeves Complete Planet Excitesearch. or au.excite.com
Find-It! Flycatcher GenDoor Genuki Search HotBot
HotWords InferenceFind Infomine Infoseek
Internet Public Library The Internet Sleuth Internets Invisible Web
Kartoo Librarian's Guide to the Internet LookSmart
Lycos or English Lycos Magellan Mamma
New Athenaeum Northern Light (Now only searches within its own resources)
NZ Genealogy Overture ProFusion Raging Search
SavvySearch Search Search Boss Search NZ Search Now NZ
Search Spaniel Snap Home Starting Point Taoma WhoWhere?
Wisenut Vivisimo. Yahoo! or (for Australia and NZ)
Metasearch engines. Combining results from several search engines checked simultaneously.
Dogpile McKinley Metacrawler Metafind
Metagopher Metasearch Web Crawler Webtaxi
Where to find specialised Search Engines and other search tools
Leiden University * Highly recommended for locating genealogy search engines
Search Engine Watch Sharkey's Search Engine Index
Search results in a foreign language?
Uploaded 23 February 2004