Now that you know how to search, where should you search? There's one obvious choice, and a lot of alternatives. Googlethe Most Popular Search Site on the WebThe best (and most popular) search engine today is Google (www.google.com). Google is easy to use and extremely fast, and returns highly relevant results. That's because it indexes more pages than any other sitemore than 8 billion pages, at last count. Most users search Google several times a week, if not several times a day. The Google home page, shown in Figure 21.1, is a marvel of simplicity and elegant web page design. All you have to do to start a search is to enter one or more keywords into the search box, then click the Google Search button. This returns a list of results ranked in order of relevance, like the one shown in Figure 21.2. Click a results link to view that page. Figure 21.1. Searching the Web at Google.Figure 21.2. The results of a Google search.Google also offers a variety of advanced search options to help you fine-tune your search. These options are found on the Advanced Search page, which you get to by clicking the Advanced Search link on Google's home page. To narrow your search results, all you have to do is make the appropriate selections from the options present. Another neat thing about Google is all the specialty searches it offers. Table 21.1 details some of these "hidden" search features:
Google also owns a number of related websites that might be of interest. In particular interest are Blogger (www.blogger.com), home to tens of thousands of personal weblogs, and Hello (www.hello.com), a photo hosting/sharing site. Other Search EnginesWhile Google is far and away the most popular search engine, there are lots of other search engines that provide excellent (and sometimes different) results. These search engines include
DirectoriesNot all search sites use search engine technology. Some sites use human editors to evaluate and organize web pages into a directory. Directories typically offer fewer but higher-quality results than pure search engines. Among the most popular web directories are
That's rightGoogle and Yahoo! offer both search engine and directory results. (You access the Yahoo! directory from the Yahoo! Web Directory section of the Yahoo! home page.) Metasearch EnginesThere are also a number of search engines that let you search multiple search engines and directories from a single pagewhich is called a metasearch. The top metasearchers include
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