Search Engine Review: The Internet Sleuth - A Superb Specialized Search Engine Finder
© Paula Dragutsky
Specialized search engines are sometimes the only practical way to find information about a topic on the web. For example, using a general search engine, you might have difficulty finding the full-text of all bills about education considered by the 104th Congress. However, you can find this information easily using a search engine devoted to federal legislation.
In addition to its role as a search engine finder, The Internet Sleuth is a proficient metasearch engine with several unique features.
METASEARCH ENGINE OFFERING MANY CHOICES
The Internet Sleuth gives you the option of doing a general web search (using Alta Vista, Infoseek, Lycos, WebCrawler and Yahoo), or searching for five kinds of information - reviewed and new sites, news, business and finance, software and Usenet - using specialized search engines.
For each type of search, there's a drop-down menu listing all the search engines available in that category. You can specify that any number of these be accessed for your search.
Unique Results Format
Search results in The Internet Sleuth look different from those in other metasearch engines.
Access to all services of original search engine: The first group of results from each search engine are displayed on a page that looks almost identical to the original search engine - including search menus, results format, and whatever services the search engine offers.
The results from each search engine appear consecutively. No effort is made to weed out duplicate items or to rate relevance across search engines. If you do a search yielding a fair number of results your printout will be fairly lengthy.
You can continue your search in any of the individual search engine's search boxes. You'll receive your results in that engine.
DETAILED SUBJECT ACCESS TO SPECIALIZED SEARCH ENGINES
The range and depth of The Internet Sleuth's subject classification system for search engines is remarkable. Newcomers to a subject will find search engines covering a wealth of introductory material. Subject specialists are likely to discover highly specific search engines that are relevant to their topic.
The Sleuth's search engine directory is divided into 21 broad subject categories and these are subdivided into many fairly detailed subcategories.
