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|| Search Indexes &
Directories || People Finder || Business
Finder || Usent Search || Metasearch
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Search
Indexes and Directories
Search indexes and directories act
as a welcome point of reference. Search sites often serve as home
pages, a trend those sites are happy to hold on to.
No longer content with providing a
simple text box and a database of indexed pages, many sites have added
extra features, such as chat, free e-mail, regional guides, and stock quotes.
Many sites, such as HotBot, infoseek, and Yahoo!, now let you search current
news database. And directories - compilations of topics with links
to Web sites - often provide much original content, such as staff reviews
of sites. Unfortunately, in the push to be Web destinations, some
sites have begun to develop cluttered interfaces, and other, new sites
seem to have put more effort into nonessential extras rather than reliable
searching.the following 12 sites are for you discover what is the best
resource for your particular needs.
People
Finder
Wonder what happened to your old high
school girlfriend? Lost that business contact's e-mail address?
Look no further than Internet people finders - free, ad-supported sites
that let you search for street addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses,
often by entering only a last name.
Most of the services here have comparable
success rates for finding people, but there is evidence of marginally more
comprehensive and up-to-date databases. Since these sites utilize
similiar if not identical databases (comprising publicly available data
from white-pages resources, the Web, ISPs, and online services), they distinguish
themselves by their way they search for information and their level of
integration with mapping and launching e-mail searches from white-pages
returns.
Business
Finder
The concept of online business finders offers
significant advantages over traditional hard-copy books: You can
find businessess all over the country without leaving your desk;
proximity searches can zoom in on nearby establishment; business hours,
and parking and payment information can be displayed along with addresses
and phone numbers.
But these services are still very much works
in progress. Clumsy interfaces and poor designs detract from the
usefulness of some sites. Incomplete and sometimes inaccurate data
may others.
Zip2
Usenet
Search
Alta vista, hot bot, Deja News, and Reference.COM
offer proprietary Usenet searching. Other search sites offer Usenet
searching, but using one of those engines. All of these Usenet search
engines support basic Boolean operations and index the full text of the
Usenet feed, althought some cover more sites than others.
Metasearch
As search sites try to become Internet destinations,
metasearch sites continues to focus on freting out informaion from multiple
search engines. The following eight metasearch sites let you input
your query once and then receive results from several engines. Top
sites, likes Pro Fusion, will format your words or phrases to fit the synataxes
accepted by each engines querried and will also integrate and rank the
results.
ProFusion