Other search engines and all catalogs seek and index top-level documents. If you are looking for an extremely obscure document with a distinctive term, and you remember nothing else about it, Alta Vista could really shine at this search, particularly if you're willing to invest the effort to learn how to construct advanced searches. If you're looking for the Sheraton Hotel or some new resources on bioremediation, you may want to start with Yahoo or Excite. 5. To understand your search results better, find out what the search engine's defaults are. Find out how to customize a search in that particular tool.
Some tools are only worth knowing well.
Alta Vista, for example, is an expert's tool, capable of very powerful retrievals. Then at Internet Rush Hour you will always have a back-door to search. Maximize your bookmarks. When you begin gathering many, many URLs, consider some of the commercial tools to enhance and maintain your bookmarks.