All of these services index the World Wide Web and provide ways to search for information. They do not all have the same information. If you don’t find what you are looking for in one of them, try another. 

MetaCrawler  
http://www.metacrawler.com/  
This metasearch engine can simultaneously query a variety of sites, including Yahoo, Lycos, Alta Vista, Open Text, and others. With such wide coverage, it’s hard to come up empty-handed. But you won’t be overwhelmed, either, because MetaCrawler eliminates duplicate and invalid entries. MetaCrawler’s interface is easy to use and lets you restrict your searches to particular geographical areas or Internet domains (.gov, .com, and so forth)—and you can set a time limit, too, for how long you are willing to wait for it to finish. MetaCrawler searches are highly configurable. You can specify multiple phrases in your search terms, although this may increase the search time. 

Alta Vista  
http://www.altavista.digital.com/  
It’s fast, it’s always available, they’ve got a huge database, and they don’t try to do too much. Allows searching of either a web page index or a Usenet article index from the main search form. Web search results are relevant and give both context and size and date of pages found. They have many search tips that they display in rotation at the top of each page. Put a “+” in front of a term to require it, a “-” to require that the term is not present. Use double quotation marks for phrase searches. They have an advanced search form that allows you to use Boolean logic (and, or, and not) and parentheses for grouping. Alta Vista also can understand more complicated searches, limited to certain portions of web documents: this can be used to find images or links to particular hosts. 

Infoseek  
http://www.infoseek.com/  
Very similar to Alta Vista, but with results that go beyond a simple hitlist of relevant pages. You can search their index of web pages, their index of Usenet news postings, news stories from the past month, their e-mail directory, company profiles, or web FAQs from the same form. Before the list of search results, you are given a list of (possibly) related topics, which can enable you to go directly to a collection of pages on the topic that you want. Result pages are presented with enough information to help you evaluate them. Uses the same “+”, “-”, and “ ” syntax as Alta Vista. Infoseek has recently changed to provide two interfaces to their search service: Ultrasmart, which provides all of the features above, and UltraSeek , http://guide.infoseek.com/Home?pg=ultra_home.html which is faster and more streamlined. Ultraseek also can understand more complicated searches, limited to certain portions of web documents; this can be used to find images or links to particular hosts. Infoseek also has a web directory, but it doesn’t look as detailed or useful as Yahoo (Yahoo is described on next page). 

Lycos  
http://www.lycos.com/  
One of the oldest web search engines. Has been revamped recently to be very fancy. 
 
Yahoo 
http://www.yahoo.com/  
Search the Yahoo internet directory—not an index of web pages, but an index to a directory of web pages. Better for general information than obscure, e.g., use this if you want guides to web page design but not if you just need a table of the URL encoding codes. Also has a very nice image archive, 
http://www.yahoo.com/Computers/Multimedia/Pictures/Archives/  

Click on the Netscape Search Icon for more Search Engines.