| There are about a dozen , general-purpose search sites out there, and many, many more specialized search sites. Table 13.1 lists the major players. You can visit any search site by entering its URL. Table 13.1. The Top Search Sites | Tool | URL | | Yahoo! | www.yahoo.com | | Excite | www.excite.com | | AltaVista | www.altavista.com | | Lycos | www.lycos.com | | Google | www.google.com | | WebCrawler | www.webcrawler.com | | Ask Jeeves | www.askjeeves.com | | GoTo | www.goto.com | Note that a few of the search sites listed in Table 13.1 are also Web portals, pages that are popular as home pages because they provide easy access to searching, news, and other popular services. Two other popular portals not only offer searches, but actually let you use several different popular search sites, all from the portal page. These are For example, right from the Netscape portal, you can submit a search term to Netscape's own search engine, or to Infoseek, AltaVista, and other popular search sites (see Figure 12.3). Figure 12.3. Some Web portals, such as the Netscape portal shown here, provide one-stop access to multiple searches.   There's a confusion about search sites, created by some ISPs and browser sellers. In part to simplify their sales pitch for novices, these folks sometimes tout their products as "featuring all the best search sites," or words to that effect. That implies that a search site is a feature in a browser, or a service provided by an ISP. That claim is, oh, what's the word hooey. A search site is a Web page, and anyone with a browser can use it. Browsers sometimes include features that can make accessing search sites easier, but no browser has a real built-in search engine, and no ISP can claim ownership of any of the important search sites. | Before beginning to use search sites, take a peek at a few from the list in Table 13.1. While visiting these pages, watch for helpful links that point to -
Instructions for using the search site, often called Help -
A text box near the top of the page, which is where you would type a search term -
Links to categories you can browse -
Reviews and ratings of recommended pages -
"Cool Sites" ” a regularly updated, random list of links to especially fun or useful pages you might want to visit just for kicks -
Other search engines  |
