At least one thing is certain, it is that a daunting list of search engines (http://searchenginewatch.com/links/article.php/2156221) will not help you much. Unless you feel particularly at ease with detailed search techniques, I advise that you stick to a few online tools which I will detail hereafter. The following list is therefore not comprehensive. Most of these tools are referenced at http://visionarymarketing.com/pointers.html.

ONLINE DIRECTORIES

e.g. yahoo! , Msn (2003 note: Netscape Netcentre is now powered by Google and is no longer an online directory)

They work wonders if you are in a hurry and if you know in anticipation what category you are after. But don't abuse them. Let us assume that you are looking for all the available websites dealing with Internet Marketing for instance, then http://www.yahoo.com (or .de for Germany / .co.uk for the UK /.fr for France …), are the right starting points for you. Also check Excite at http://companyinfo.excite.com/site_map/index.html or Cyberexpress at http://www.cyberxpress.com. A flurry of specialised online directories are also available such as the business directory at http://www.the-business-directory.net

INDIVIDUAL SEARCH ENGINES

e.g. hotbot, lycos, altavista etc.

There are so many of them that it would be impossible to list them all here. What's more, you won't need them much once you have discovered their betters, i.e. the meta search engines. However, some of them are better than others, simply because they are more popular. Search engines require that webmasters (that is, those in charge of the Internet site) put a request forward to them in order to be referenced. Then they launch what they name their spiders on these URLs in order to index whatever they can from the home page or the collection of pages that has been registered. What it means is if a webmaster is too lazy for registering his URLs with all the main existing search engines, then he or she will stick to the most famous of these engines.

And this is why information tracking is more accurate on the big than the small ones. As a result, in most cases, you will not have to bother about smaller search engines, and mainly if you are a beginner, you run better chances by trying to optimise your searches on one of the three main engines. Please note too that Lycos is mostly helpful because it allows you to search for multimedia files, altavista is good for searching newsgroups and particularly helpful for its babelfish (http://babelfish.altavista.com/) online translation service. I don't think much of its translation capabilities but you will find it invaluable if you want to browse in a language which you master only imperfectly.

ONLINE REFERENCE BOOKS

e.g. infoplease, onlelook, Merriam Webster's, britannica online, Msn Expedia and Encarta etc.,

Reference books such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica online are not free. But may try it for a period of 30 days. I recommend Infoplease (http://www.infoplease.com) which comes free of charge and never fails to deliver the basic information that you need. Encarta works good too (http://www.encarta.com now also available in German at http://de.encarta.msn.com/ or in French at http://fr.encarta.msn.com/) Onelook (http://www.onelook.com) will give you free access to all sorts of online dictionaries including technical ones. So, if you after a medical or engineering term, you will easily find them there. Merriam Webster's online (http://www.m-w.com) is the reference for US-English, it's free and it comes with a free online thesaurus and complete etymology. It is an absolute must on the Net.

META SEARCH ENGINES

Very little is known of meta-search engines and yet I barely use anything else. On http://visionarymarketing.com/pointers.html you will find a list of some of the Net's most interesting meta-search engines. Three meta-engines are head and shoulders above the rest :

(1) Metacrawler (http://www.metacrawler.com) is very straightforward and it now includes a multimedia search engine (2) Mamma (http://www.mamma.com) is as straightforward as metacrawler (3) Kartoo (http://www.kartoo.com) litterally maps your search and displays the links between the websites which are tied to one another through their keywords. Although developed by a French team, versions in several foreign languages including English are available. There are also options which enable you to restrict your search to a specific country. Please note that Inferencefind, my one-time favourite has now sadly gone under.

MULTIMEDIA AND FILE SEARCHES

Searching for multimedia files is no longer a challenge. Almost all search engines including Google cater for multimedia files. Searching for different file formats is also possible now. When in Google, select the "Advanced Search" link at and in the file format box select any of the available file formats available such as Word, Powerpoint and Excel,...

OFFLINE SEARCH TOOLS

ONLINE BOOKSTORES

http://amazon.com or Barnes and Nobles (http://www.barnesandnoble.com) are good places to start if you wish to build a bibliography. Direct links to Amazon's description help you add meat to a website or report effortlessly, and if you are a site owner and wish to make money with it, you may join the Amazon partnership program.

RANKINGS

Google now provides excellent rankings thanks to its Google toolbar. I find it most useful when I want to see whether a Website is really popular.

Figure 2: The Google Toolbar displays accurate rankings which show the popularity of a Website [check this Website for details on how PageRank is working].

RECOMMENDATIONS

• The last thing you need to do is to try all the search engines one by one. You will find that serious Internet information trackers have their pet search-bots and that they stick to them. Some will try to impress you with a list 2 feet long full of exotic Urls but you do not need to believe them. It serves no purpose at all,
• Do bookmark the advanced page of your favourite search or meta-search engine, even if you don't use their options all the time. These advanced pages let you enter restrictions for your choices, or they offer a selection of file types (multimedia for instance),
• Unless you are an Internet search wizkid, don't bother about boolean search options (AND, +, OR, … or any combination of those) as most of the time they prove useless and cumbersome gimmicks,
• Switch engines if you find that the connection is too slow (or if you have given up hope on your favourites) but otherwise avoid changing tools all the time. Performance varies greatly from day to day as always on the Net,
• Most users stop after the first page of results. That's a big mistake because search engines accuracy ratings are, most of the time, wide of the mark. This is mainly because spiders use some special hidden Html tags (called meta-tags) which most webmasters fail to update or even create. As a consequence, the presence of their website at the top of the search result list is rather uncertain, even if their relevance is maximum. So please keep on reading, even if result lists most of the time look like garbled lines of endless rubbish,
• Beware of online directories, for they resort to individuals who index the sites which they arbitrarily sort within categories. As a result, some of these portals prove very difficult to use and they will not show all that is available on the Net regarding your search. If the indexing staff at Yahoo! for instance have chosen not to display a website it won't show at all even if it contains exactly the information you require.

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