March 1997
Internet Prospector

Search Engine Comparison

Quick Tips:

• Study a search engine's help file. Your payoff will be targeted search results.
• Note how using capitalization or quotes in your query allows one to search by proper nouns or phrases. Some search engines don't recognize capitalization, but search results will not likely be adversely impacted if you do capitalize.
• Note above how the "+" symbol requires a search string to appear in the matching results. We are starting to see standardization in the search engine industry, both with search companies as above and with Web sites that are searchable, such as newspaper archives.
• Look for search engine options to sort by relevancy, Web site, etc. Excite's many thousands of hits counts total documents. Sort by Web site and you can reduce the matching hits to a few manageable sites.
• Don't let a hitlist of a zillion matching documents scare you off. The best search engines will automatically sort by relevance. Thus, your best matches will appear at the top of the list. Each search engine may use varying factors to sort by, including: does the search string appear in the title, total number of times the string appears in the document, etc.
• See the Internet Prospector's Search Engines: What's In It For The Searcher. You'll find pointers to learning how search engines work and how Webmasters can influence the position of their site in search engine indices.
• For quick tips on searching for foundations on the Web, see the Prospector's Foundation/Grants page for March '97.