Search Engine Reviews: AOL NetFind, Snap and Galaxy
you can search the full-text of (almost) all the web pages listed in its directory.
Galaxy is particularly suited to subject specialists or those doing research on a topic. Most subjects include far more academic and scholarly websites than are listed in the typical directory.
Subjects Covered: The Engineering and Technology category is particularly detailed. Some of its subdivisions are Agile Manufacturing Information Infrastructure, Manufacturing and Processing Materials Science and Technology Transfer.
Many non-technical subjects are also covered, for example, Film and Video, Magic, and Pets.
Unfortunately, in the directory categories that I tested, Galaxy seemed to have more than its share of non-working links. Notwithstanding, there are many links that do connect to valuable websites so your patience will pay off.
Organized By Source: Galaxy gives only the title of web pages listed. However the listings are organized by source (e.g. academic organization, government organization) or type of document (article). This can give you an indication of the information's content and credibility.
Search Tips: If you search using the regular search box, you'll be searching the full text of all the web pages in Galaxy's directory.
There's no icon or word you can select to search. Instead, put your cursor in the search box, and press the Return (or Enter) key.
You can search using the Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT. You can also use the asterisk to stem words. An important weakness is that there is no way to search for phrases.
Going to Galaxy's Advanced Search will give you more options. You can choose to search the full-text of directory web pages, just the titles, just the links within the web pages, or all of these. You can also choose to search Galaxy (directory) pages, Gopher titles (mainly ftp files and newsgroups), and Telnet resources (mainly academic libraries).
Informative Results: There are three result output formats - short, medium and long. Galaxy's long format is amazingly informative.
It gives you the item's relevance score, size, title, excerpt from the document, a list of the words used most frequently and the number of times used, outline (which are subtitles from the item), Galaxy subject category, type of site (e.g. academic organization, event), url, date entered and date indexed.
More articles are available about search and metasearch engines.
In fact, there are great articles and links for over 400 different topics offered by Suite 101. Check it out!
Latest Articles