Re: The Best Search Engines: Is FastSearch Six Times BetterthanYahoo?

Yep....tried just about all of them.  Personal favorites are still
two freebies who reside on my box and search all the major
engines....Webferret and Copernic.  Webferret is fast as greased
lightening and Copernic allows saving of searches and is better for
multiple keyword searches - also has other features.  Both of them
have a small ad at the top, but you don't have put up with all the
banners that going to the actual search engine sites entail, plus the
annoyance of all the cookie setting and time going from page to page
on their hits.  Webferret gives you a max. of 500 hits and Copernic
300.  Generally ample to find what is needed.  Both permit sorting of
hits, alphabetically by hit name or by URL.  Copernic also has the
ability to go through and get rid of hits that are 404's or otherwise
unreachable....nice little bits of software and very convenient as
they will activate your internet connection for you if you start a
search and are not online.

Webferret can be found at:  http://www.ferretsoft.com/

Copernic can be found at:  http://www.copernic.com/

If you want to know more about search engines - how they work, what
they do, which is doing what and how to submit to them plus more than
you can imagine about them, visit Search Engine Watch - also has a
free email newsletter for those who can't get enough info. about
search engines:-)  It can be found at: http://searchenginewatch.com/

Search engines are only as good as their underlying indexing
functions and none of them index the entire web.  I believe that the
max. is something like 16% of web sites, although one of them (can't
remember who) claims 40% of the web is indexed...not actually true
from what I read.

In order to get indexed, a site has to be submitted and most engines
are very backlogged at hitting new submissions and getting them in
their indexes.  There are something like 16 million web pages or
sites out in cyberspace right now from what I read and more added
every day.  It is getting harder and harder to find stuff, especially
if it is on a rather obscure topic.  However, once indexed, a search
engine generally sends a spider around every few weeks or months to
see what's new.

Unfortunately for smaller sites on obscure topics - as in devoted to
one genus of plant - many of the engines are now ranking hits either
by how much the site is willing to pay the engine or by the number of
links to that site...puts some that might contain what you were
looking for way down at the bottom of the heap.

Bottom line is that if you want a bit of rather obscure information,
it is likely out there somewhere, but the chances are that you have
to dig deep to find it.  If I don't get what I want from my two
resident mega search engines, I will go to some of the individual
engines and work my way to the bottom of their generally gargantuan
lists of hits.  If that fails, I start going through my bookmarks,
site by site and searching....very time consuming.  What I want
someone to come up with is a way to search one's list of bookmarked
sites only - without having to have the index of all of them taking
up hard disk space on my box.  Found one site doing this, but didn't
really like what you had to do to participate in it.

Web searching is an interesting pastime, to be sure:-)

Marge Talt, zone 7 Maryland
mtalt@clark.net
Editor:  Gardening in Shade
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----------
> From: Rich Horowitz <HoroRL@AOL.COM>
> Date: Monday, December 20, 1999 11:07 AM
>
> Good morning, all:
>
> Has anyone tried <www.mamma.com>.  This search engine uses about 7
other
> search engines including yahoo.   FYI
>
> Happy holidays,
>
> Rich Horowitz
> Stoughton MA
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