Internet Searchers

For most of my fast, simple searches I use Hotbot .  Quick to load and easy to use (although they're experimenting with layouts), I do most of my internet searching with this.  You can search the Hotbot database from this page:

For more complex searches I prefer AltaVista's Advanced Search.  AltaVista is very fast, and powers many common searches, such as Bigfoot and Yahoo(!).  AltaVista is only case-sensitive if you use capitals.   Put quotes around the words or phrases, and capitalize all boolean operators (AND/OR/NOT). An easier way is to use [find this word] +[and this word] -[and not this word]"

ie - "Pompous Guide" AND "Siggy" NOT "edutainement"

or "Pompous +Guide +Siggy -edutainment"

Click here for alternate Chinese, Korean, and Japanese versions.  AltaVista can also translate typed text or entire web pages to and from English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.  AltaVista uses Systran to do the translation, and this free program is available for download here.

For a bit more powerful search that's slower to load I use Lycos' Pro Search, available in both Java and html (below).  Actually, I think it's equally powerful toAltaVista, but the page is slower so it must be better, right?

Next up is Infoseek, both fast and powerful; handy for international searches.  Run the Infoseek engine from this page, below:

For searching for particular filenames and descriptions on FTP servers, I like the power of FAST FTP Search, but prefer Filez for its categorized file archive:

FTP Search

All Files Macintosh Mac Games Win/DOS Mac Games Win/DOS Win Games Acorn Amiga Atari Cursors Fonts Graphics Icons Midi Newton Movies OS/2 Sounds Unix 50 10 20 50 100 200 500

For looking up people's listed home addresses and phone numbers, I generally use Switchboard or WhoWhere respectively, which are on this page below.  To locate an address that you've found, AltaVista MAPS is an excellent map search bye location.   AltaVista MAPS: Fancy Features does nearly the same thing, but draws maps based on the phone number of the target instead.  Two other good phone searches that I use include People and Phone Number Search, and 555-1212.com.  Finally, for international phone number searches, the Telestra Springboard: Global Phone Directory Index is a good place to start.  To find (or buy) other personal information, the CIS Investigative Resources page is a massive collection of links to detective-related businesses, organizations, and web services.

And finally, when I'm looking for something specific and obscure and these engines have failed me, I turn to the impressive 'comprehensive search' on IBM's search engine or Metacrawler.  These two aren't really engines of their own, but are tools that submit your query to nine of the best searchers and shows you the results of the engine with the most hits.  If you really care- these are the engines that they uses: [IBM's]- Open Text, Lycos, WebCrawler, InfoSeek, Excite, Inktomi (the HotBot engine), Alta Vista, Yahoo, and Galaxy; [Metacrawler]- Lycos, Infoseek, WebCrawler, Excite, AltaVista, Yahoo, others.

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© 1996 Bluewolf