Christie s list is organized by type of resource Gopher, World Wide Web, Newsgroups, Mailing Lists, and IRC Chat. A search engine is provided to assist locating entries by keyword. While most of the directories I ve mentioned have search engines, not all search engines have directories. Search engines like Alta Vista, MetaCrawler, and Northern Light Search do not list Web sites by information content category. Instead, information is located by searching a database of web sites, delivering a list of sites matching the search parameters to the user.
Search engines are the key tool for locating information on the web.
Digital Equipment Corporation developed AltaVista to index the entire Internet. Using AltaVista, you can find any word in any document published on the World Wide Web or in Usenet discussion groups by searching a 100 Gigabyte database. To prevent drowning in a sea of hits requires a working knowledge of Boolean searches. A Boolean search uses AND, OR, NOT, NEAR and other logic terms to frame a search in way that a computer can separate the wheat from the chaff. The four basic Boolean logic terms are AND finds documents containing all of the specified words or phrases.