Search The Web

SEARCH THE WORLD WIDE WEB
All the Web	Altavista	ANsearch	Anzwers
Dogpile	Excite	Google	Hotbot
Live Search	Mooter	Sensis	Yahoo

Ditto - search engine for pictures	FindSounds - search engine for audio
Other Search Engines and Indexes	Blacktown Library's Subject Guide to the Web

MAPS and DIRECTIONS SEARCH

Google Maps	NRMA Travel Planner	Microsoft Maps Live Search
Street-Directory	Travelmate	WhereIs

OTHER SEARCH

White Pages White pages phone directory

Yellow Pages Yellow pages phone directory

Australia Post Search all things postal

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Librarian's Ultimate Guide to Search Engines

What is a Search Engine

About Information on the Internet

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Other Search Engines

SEARCH ENGINES
A Search Engine is a keyword index to web pages.

AOL	Euroseek search in multiple European languages	Search Engine Colossus directory of search engines related to a specific country
Factbites	Gigablast	Lycos

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META SEARCH ENGINES
A Meta Search Engine will automatically search a number of Search Engines at once.

All-in-One Seach	Clusty	Mamma
Search.com	Webcrawler	Windseek

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SUBJECT INDEXES
A Subject Index is a selection of web pages, usually arranged by subject or within a specific subject area.

Beaucoup	Galaxy	Search Engine Guide directory of search engines and indexes by subject
Virtual Library	Web Wombat

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DEEP SEARCH
Search the hidden parts of the web! Databases and more.

Complete Planet

Science.gov (USA)

Turbo10

WHAT IS A SEARCH ENGINE?

A search engine is an index to the information stored on the pages of World Wide Web computers.

Search engines usually arrange their information in two ways: hierarchy or keyword.

An example of a hierarchical index is Yahoo The information here is sorted into categories and you can work you way down the layers of information until you find what you are after.

An example of the keyword index is AltaVista. Here you type a word or words and the system will return a list of documents which match.

Both systems have advantages and disadvantages. The thing to remember with both is to be as specific as you can and bookmark or remember sites which you find useful.

WHAT IS A URL

URL stands for Universal Resource Locator and it is the strange looking string of characters in the Location line just below the icons at the top of the page.

To explain what it means, let's look at one (Sydney Morning Herald):

• http://www.smh.com.au
  For now we'll forget the http:// part. (It stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol and is to do with how information is moved from one machine to another).
• www is name of the computer which you are accessing. Although less common now, in the early days of the World Wide Web, it was usual practice to use the label www.
• smh is the name of the organisation which owns the computer you are accessing.
• com is the type of organisation; commercial, educational, government and organisation (usually nonprofit) are the most common.
• au is the country code; au is Australia. All countries have a code except the United States.

With this bit of information, you can actually try going directly to many company or government pages without using an index. Try www.companyname.com for most multinationals e.g. Microsoft, IBM, Sony and so on can be found this way. Or www.greenpeace.org for Greenpeace. It may not always be this easy, but you might like to try.

There are a number of books which can help you, but remember, the Internet is not a neat and tidy place. Ask the staff to help if you have problems.

Good luck!