Search Engines from the United Kingdom - Reviews and Search Tips

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Jun 11, 1998

All of our beliefs - from the proper way to boil an egg to the preferred procedure for choosing a leader - have been influenced by the country and culture in which we live. One way to understand how people in the United Kingdom view a particular subject is to search for information about it on UK web sites. Some first-rate UK-based search engines you might use are searchUK, UK Plus, and UK Yellow Web.

Because the Internet developed most rapidly in the United States, some of the large US search engines have more UK sites in their indexes than do search engines from the United Kingdom. Of the US giants, Lycos, Excite, and Infoseek offer the easiest and most effective ways to search UK web sites.

searchUK - THE LARGEST UNITED KINGDOM SEARCH ENGINE

If you're looking for material about a specific topic from a UK perspective, you stand a good chance of finding it at searchUK (http://www.searchuk.com). It's the largest search engine that includes only sites originating in the UK. So far it has just one special feature - weather reports for the United Kingdom.

In general, searchUK has an excellent search system and is easy to navigate. Most of the searches that I did resulted in at least a few items containing the information I was looking for.

Search Tips

In addition to the Boolean operators, AND, OR and NOT, you can use the plus sign to require terms and quotation marks to enclose phrases.

Since truncation using the asterisk is not supported, it's often important to include several forms of your search words by using the OR operator and parentheses. For example:

(dog OR dogs) AND training

Menu Choices: There are menus for displaying the number and format of results, and for restricting a search to specific types of websites (commercial, academic, non-profit and government).

In searchUK's Advanced Search mode there's also a menu for displaying results by domain. US searchers, don't get confused - domain means web site in the UK. Using the domain option can be a great help in deciding which web sites to visit.

Coping With Language Differences

Speaking of language differences, these can present a problem for Americans in formulating searches. If you think you should be getting more results than you are from a particular search term, try a synonym or a more general term.

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