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Brief Reviews Of The Major Search Engines - Strengths, Weaknesses And Recent Changes

© Paula Dragutsky

In order to stay competitive with each other, the major search engines have been changing and improving themselves at an amazing pace. And we - the searchers - are the winners.

Intuitive menus have made searching easier and more precise. New features offer a simple way to find information about the most commonly sought for subjects.

In this article, I'll outline recent changes that have been made in Alta Vista, Excite, HotBot, Infoseek, Lycos, and Northern Light, summarize their strengths and weaknesses, and specify when they are most useful.

ALTA VISTA - THE LARGEST SEARCH ENGINE ADDS USEFUL FEATURES

Recent Changes - Alta Vista (http://altavista.digital.com) sports a new look along with some valuable new services. Searchers now have access to recommended websites about thousands of subjects through LookSmart's excellent directory. Several first-rate special features (e.g., Health, Finance, Entertainment) are another laudable addition.

Strengths - Alta Vista's great strength is its large size (140 million web pages) and thoroughness in indexing sites. If you're persistent, you can almost always find some unique material about your subject.

Restricting searches to words in titles (using the title: operator) often yields more results in Alta Vista than in other search engines because of the vast amount of pages indexed. For the same reason, searching for phrases is often a good strategy.

Alta Vista makes it possible to find and use information from all over the world. A drop-down menu gives you the choice of searching for documents in 25 languages. Using Alta Vista's remarkable Translate feature, you can instantly translate any web page into a variety of languages.

Weaknesses - Alta Vista has very few search menus to help the new or inexperienced searcher.

Because of Alta Vista's size, you often have to narrow your search more than is necessary in other engines in order to screen out irrelevant results. Duplication of results is sometimes a problem.

Especially useful for - Difficult or arcane searches, research, and maximum coverage of your subject.

EXCITE - COMFORTABLE FOR BEGINNERS - A VARIETY OF SPECIAL FEATURES

Recent Changes - Excite (http://www.excite.com) has had a face-lift and added a few special features, but there have been no significant changes. One annoyance it has rectified is that it now displays the number of items resulting from a search.

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