Catalog search engines
In 1994, two graduate students at Stanford Universty's school of electrical engineering started compiling lists of their favorite Web sites as a hobby. Truth is, there wasn't too many sites back then to compile. They organized their site by subject areas so that new sites were stored under heading such as computer sites, government sites, education sites, etc.
But as the Web grew, so did their list and so did the number of people who were using their handy site. At one point, it became so unwieldy the pair put the site list in a database and designed a little search engine help users find information fast. They served the Web pages from their school computers and they called it Yahoo!
The idea is simple. Even obvious. It made the two millionaires many, many times over. The site now has 120 million visitors each month and more than 750,000 sites link to Yahoo. It is the most popular free site on earth.
A catalog search engine (also called a directory search engine or a heirarchical index) is simply a list of good web sites organized by subject. All of them contain a key word search function that lets you search a description of the sites. While catalog search engines don't include all of the 72 million sites (est. 2000) that make up the Web, they usually include the most popular. Yahoo, the grandaddy of them all, categorizes an estimated 1.8 million sites -- which is still only about 2% of the sites out there. But the sites they do catalog represent the majority of Web traffic.
Here are some popular catalog search engines:
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Yahoo | http://www.yahoo.com |
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Looksmart | http://www.looksmart.com |
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Open Directory | http://dmoz.org |
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Bosnia ba | http://www.bosnia.ba |
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Bosnia Online | http://www.bosnia-online.com |
To use these sites, simply click on the subject area that is most similar to what you are interested in. If you are looking for a university, click on the link for education and then drill down into the links to find the site you are looking for.
There is also a search feature at the top of the page. This feature searches a database of site descriptions. It does not search the Web page itself like a key word search engine would (see lesson 5).
To use this feature, simply type in one or two search terms you are interested in and you will get back a list of links to potential sites that may be related to your search terms. Read the descriptions carefully and select those that most closely match what you're interested in.
Catalog search engines are useful but they are not the only tool in your toolbox. Here is some of the searches they are good at and some of the searchs they are not so good at.
- They are good at finding Web sites of organizations, businesses, individuals or agencies as opposed to finding individual Web pages.
- They are good at finding a Web site that is dedicated to a particular topic such as mountain biking, ecology, the Gaelic language, etc.
- They are good to use when you're not sure what you are looking for or have limited knowledge of a topic.
- They are bad at finding individual Web pages.
- They are bad at finding information that is very specific, or may not be the central focus of a Web site such as finding an expert in horse animal husbandry or looking up the most recent research on depleted uranium.
- They are bad at finding specific individuals unless you know where they work.
Often what you need in those cases is the topic of our next lesson, a key word search engine