Illinois Web Design

A Search Engine is a very useful tool for finding the relevent websites that you are searching for on the internet's World Wide Web.

The best Search Engines use a spider program to follow the links across the web, then it sorts, indexes and ranks all the pages that it finds.  When you do a search at the Search Engine it looks thru the index to find the most relevent websites to display to you.  Every Search Engine is not the same,  they use different ways to come up with their final results.

In my opinion the very best Search Engines to use include Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, MSN.  Many people on the internet claim that Google is broken since it shows too many unrelevent websites for many searches.  The jury is still out,  hopefully it will get better in time.

There are other secondary Search Engines and newer Search Engines that you should keep your eye on that include Gigablast, IceRocket, WebCrawler and Wisenut.  You can also find many smaller and niche Search Engines at the Search Engine Colossus.

The Open Directory Project DMOZ is the largest human edited directory on the planet.  It has 60,000+ editors whom have sorted over 4 million quality websites into 590,000+ categories.  Browse around or use their search to find categories of websites about any subject.

Some of the other more popular Search Engines get their search results from somewhere else,  for example:  About, Aol, Excite, Hotbot, and Netscape get some (or all) of their Search results from Google. 

Searching with a Search Engine is deceptively simple,  you type in what you are looking for in the box,  hit the search button, and it shows you exactly what you were looking for,  Right?  Ususally not,  but here are some tricks to improve your results:

1)  Search for the keywords you think should be on the page you are seeking.

2)  Use phrases by adding "Quotes" around words that you think should appear together.

3)  Use an addition sign ( + ) in front of words that MUST be on the page,  use a subtraction sign ( - ) before words that should NOT be on the page.

4)  Try using the "Advanced Search" found at most Search Engines.