Resources - Search Engines

Canada	Canada-wide:AlcanSeek (Canada & Alaska) AltaVista Canada, Canada.com, Canadasearch.com, CanadianWebs, Canlinks Directory, Search Canada, Search Canadian, Maple Square, WebCity, Yahoo!. By Province: BC: AreaGuide B.C.,  BCComm.Net Directory,  B.C. Directory,  B.C. Guide,  B.C. Issues,  B.C. Search,  BeautifulBC.Net,  MyBC,  searchBC,  SuperNatural BC,  Travel.bc.ca,  WhOOdoo B.C.. Quebec: La Toile du Quebec, Abondance By City: BC: Prince George, Vancouver Ontario: Ottawa Quebec: Montreal
General Purpose	Altavista, Direct Hit, Excite, Google, HotBot, Infoseek. Northern Lights.
Images & Sounds	AltaVista Photo Finder, The Amazing Picture Machine, American Memory, ditto.com, HotBot: SuperSearch, WebSEEk.
Regional	Search Engines Worldwide - A no-nonsense metasite listing over 1200 search engines for over 160 countries listed alphabetically by country. Whether users are looking for a search engine from Armenia, Bolivia, Lebanon, Samoa, Yemen, or just about anywhere else, they will find it here. The page for Canada has links to over 30 search engines and directories.
Specialized	Foreign Language: French: Abondance

 
Alphabetical List of Search Engines

Abondance - Links to seven french language "moteurs de recherche" and instructions (in French) on how to use the popular English search engines.

Adobe PDF Search Engine - Most search engines ignore PDF files. The new Adobe PDF Search Engine has summaries from more than a million documents across the web. Clicking links doesn't automatically load documents (which can be large), instead, you'll be first shown a summary, then you can choose to download or view through a properly equipped browsers.

Altavista - massive and fast, good for unique words or phrases. Refines searches by providing a list of Internet keywords related to your search topic at the top of your results list. Note: You don't need an ISP if you don't mind accessing the Internet through an Altavista portal - the company now offers free, unlimited 56K modem Internet access.

Search feature summary (Main Search Help, Advanced Search Help):

• supports Boolean searching (AND, OR, AND NOT, NEAR - written in CAPS)
• can limit search by date range
• can rank results by relevancy of specified keywords
• can specifiy language of search from drop down list
• case sensitive (lower case searches both, upper case only upper case)
• uses wildcards (try big*, to find big, bigger, biggest, and bigwig).

AltaVista Photo Finder searches 17 million images, audio clips and video files from the web and private collections.

American Memory US historical images and sounds.

The Amazing Picture Machine (NCREL) is a small database of pictures suitable for education.

Ask Jeeves! has prepared answers to common questions - ask in natural language.  Results include search hits from four engines at bottom of page.

Ditto.com has high-quality, non-objectionable pictures that can be searched or browsed.

Direct Hit calls itself a "popularity engine" because it ranks your results based on the results other searchers have chosen.

Excite - suggests a list of words to refine or refocus your first search term. If one of these is correct, choose "search for more documents like this one" to retrieve related results.

HotBot SuperSearch's template helps you create a Boolean or phrase search, or coaches you in ways to define your search (by media type, programming language, geographic location, personal name and date).

HotBot: SuperSearch has a template with options for media type.

InfoGrid - In a compact format, InfoGrid provides direct links to major search sites and topical web sites in different categories.

Infoseek search with capital letters to force an exact case match on the entire word (e.g. Al Gore and NeXT)

Google is a plain, simple search engine (without any distracting advertising). It returns important, relevant hits quickly (pages are cached), with terms matched in close proximity and bolded in the results. Decides importance and value based on pages that link to that page. Good if you are looking for a few, fast hits.

GoTo is a paid placement search engine (essentially a Yellow Pages-style service. Relevancy at GoTo is simply whoever pays the most, not editorial content.

Northern Lights organizes results into folders to help you refine your idea (e.g. pollution = air? water? light? noise?), or to choose the correct meaning (eg. dolphins = animal? sports team?).

searchBC is a search engine for British Columbia which which confines its activities to sites in the .bc.ca domain, sites in the .com, .net and .org domains which are listed by InterNIC as being located in BC, and sites in the .ca domain which are not part of another Provincial domain.

WebSEEk from Columbia University catalogues 650,000 images and videos on Web sites.

xRefer - Free access to over 250,000 entries - facts, words, concepts, people & quotations.