/ Search Engines

With an estimated 1 billion pages on the WWW, no search engine can hope to index every site available online. Why can't one search engine automatically sift through every page and index them all? Doing so would be similar to trying to count every car on a fast moving freeway with dozens of lanes. Some cars make a constant route, every day. You can count on them being on the freeway at some point. Others make one quick dash and are gone. Similarly, some pages have been online for years; others are posted for a few hours and withdrawn. Even those pages which remain are constantly shifted as their maintainers develop new organizational patterns for their sites. As the phrase goes, "one can never step into the same electronic river twice."

Deciding which search engine is best for you depends on a few factors. If you seek the broadest, most extensive array of sites online, you're more likely to be happy with an automated search engine. But remember that the largest site, Google covers only 560 million pages - even though it boasts coverage of over a billion. You can select the automated search engines that covers the most pages from the pull-down menu. To add to this collection, please email me the title and address of your suggestion.

Knowing how many hundreds of millions of sites are indexed by a particular engine may be interesting, but it is hardly helpful if you want to find quality information. Here, the notion of what "counts" online becomes paramount. Any number of people may have developed pages dedicated to the presidential race of 2000, but which ones would you wish your students to cite in a paper about the contemporary political scene? Here, it's helpful to remember that automated search engines may be effective in retrieving a large cache of data, but you'll probably need to examine search engines that are edited by a human being at some point. Turning to hand indexed engines like Yahoo! is a good step. But Yahoo! offers a relatively small number of pages and cannot vouch for the validity of their contents.

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