Librarians and other search professionals create these subject directories to fit the needs of their customers. Yahoo , the largest commercial portal or subject directory is a good example. These sites chosen are by the Reference Staff to fit the needs of our Salem Public Library patrons. Infomine created by University of California, is an excellent example of carefully chosen, scholarly sites. Internet Public Library is a broad collection of quality Internet sites When searching for a specific or obscure fact or piece of information, try a search engine.
Search engines are huge databases of webpages that have been assembled automatically by machine.
Whenever you search the web using a search engine, you are asking the engine to scan its index of sites and match your keywords and phrases with those in the texts of documents within the engine's database. One of the newest and best search engines to hit the 17 inch monitor is Google . This search engine only searches. You won't find the weather or the news or advertisements. It is fast and almost always brings up what you need in the first couple of sites.