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Reviews of Excite and Reference.COM + Using The Title Operator To Narrow Your Search

© Paula Dragutsky

EXCITE - EASY AND EFFECTIVE

If you're new to the Internet, Excite (http://www.excite.
com) is one of the best search engines to start with. Its search system is both effective and exceptionally easy to use. Even in Power Search mode, Excite's search language is presented in menu form so there are no commands to memorize. Navigation between different pages as well as search speed are relatively fast.

There are fewer ways to refine a Web search in Excite than in many of the other engines (for example, you can't restrict the search to words in Web page titles). Excite's attitude seems to be, "Don't worry dear, I'll do it for you."

After every document resulting from a search, you can specify that you want more (items) like this. And in most cases, Excite does a fine job of pinpointing what you want and giving you more Web pages like it.

Use Channels To Find Leading Sites About Many Topics

Whatever your level of Web-searching experience, Excite is an excellent place to go if you want to introduce yourself to a subject. Its channels give you the outstanding Web sites about specific subjects, such as gardening or the stock market.

To appreciate the value of this, it helps to understand the difference between Web sites and Web pages (although these terms are often used interchangeably). A Web site is the general Internet location for a company, person, etc., and can contain many Web pages. For example, Garden Escape site's pages include the Garden Escape Magazine, an interactive Plant Finder, and a live gardening chat.

You can search newsgroups using Excite through its connection with Deja News. Basically, you'll be using the Deja News search engine.

Some of the additional services provided by Excite include yellow pages, bulletin boards, weather forecasts, roadmaps, travel reservations and an e-mail address-finder. These features vary in effectiveness. For example, both the weather forecasting and roadmap services didn't include the cities I was inquiring about.

REFERENCE.COM - NEEDS WORK

Reference.COM (http://www.reference.com) searches newsgroups, some mailing lists, and Web site bulletin boards. It seems to have good potential, but has a way to go before I'd recommend it. When I used it in November, 1997, all searches could only go back to 1997 (as compared to 1995 in Deja News).

Reference.COM advertises the ability to browse newsgroups, mailing lists and bulletin boards, but beware! I tried the browsing feature three times, and three times my screen froze, twice bumping me off the Internet, but not breaking the connection (something new to me).

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