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Yahoo | AltaVista | Lycos | Google | AllTheWeb| Meta Search Engines


Yahoo

Go directly to Yahoo! | Get Help! with your search.

Probably the best-known and easiest-to-use search engine around, a good starting place if you're new to searching, just surfing for sites, or if your search is not very complicated.

Tips for searching:

  • Enter some general search terms, and Yahoo! will find subject category listings to match your search.
  • Go directly to the Yahoo! site and browse the subject categories.

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Go directly to Altavista | Get Help! with your search.

A fast and powerful search engine. Select Family Filter for a filtered internet search.

Tips for searching:

  • Put quotes around words that must appear "as a phrase."
  • Put +plus +signs before words that must appear in the results.
  • Put -minus -signs before words that must not appear in the results.
  • Put an asterisk after the beginning of a word, to search for all the possible endings for the word (e.g. econom* for economy, economics, economical, etc.).
  • Capitalize Formal Names.
  • Altavista is able to understand plain-English questions
    (e.g. What is the capital of Bolivia?)

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Lycos

Go directly to Lycos | Get Help! with your search.

Use Lycos SearchGuard for a filtered search.

Tips for searching:

  • Put quotes around words that must appear "as a phrase."
  • Put +plus +signs before words that must appear in the results.
  • Put -minus -signs before words that must not appear in the results.
  • Lycos searches for all of the terms entered by default; go to Lycos's
    site to use its boolean search option.
  • Also go to Lycos's site to use its natural language search option.
  • Check out Lycos's subject categories and its Top 5% Sites subject
    categories lists.

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Google

Go directly to Google | Get Help with your search

Tips for searching:

  • To enter a query into Google, enter a few descriptive words for your list of relevant results. Google only searches for pages that exactly match your search terms, so you can try using different versions of your search terms.
  • Google automatically adds "and" between the words you enter so it only returns those pages that include all of your search terms. To restrict a search further, just include more terms. Google also prefers pages in which related query terms are near each other.
  • Use quotes around specific phrases to focus your search on occurrences of the actual phrase. Examples:
    recipes for "chocolate cake"
    "General Dynamics"
    Google also recognizes hyphens, slashes, periods, equal signs, and apostrophes as phrase connectors. Phrase connectors work like quotes; for example, mother-in-law is treated as a phrase even if the three words aren't in quotes.

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AllTheWeb
Search for
 
Go directly to AllTheWeb | Get Help with your search | [Advanced Search]

Use quotes with phrases, + to require, or - to exclude.

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Meta Search Engines

WebCrawler

Combine terms using AND, OR or NOT. | Help!

Metacrawler Search

Search Lycos, Infoseek, WebCrawler, Excite, Alta Vista, and Yahoo simultaneously. | Help! 

You may also want to try these search engines:

For more information about search engines, visit Search Engine Watch.


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Last update December 14, 2004
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