W310: Searching the Web: The truth is out there you just have to find it                                                             

The growth of Web has been tremondous. There are now about 150 million sites on the web and that number is doubling about 5 years. Thus, with so much information out there one must be able to perform competent searches or else you will inundated with a lot of information or worse, a lot of incorrect information.

Here are some search engines and tips for finding useful and relevant information on the Web.

1.  Web 66

This site's goal is to register every school in not only the United States, but also around the world.  The site has links to a few thousand different schools ranging from elementary to high school.  The site is sponosored by the University of Minnesota's School of Education and Human Development.  The Web66 project is designed to facilitate the introduction of this technology into K12 schools.  The goals of this project are:

1.To help K12 educators learn how to set up their own Internet servers.
2.To link K12 web servers and the educators and students at those schools.
3.To help K12 educators find and use K12 appropriate resources on the web.

1. www.dig.com

Dig.com is a product of the Disney corporation. This search is engine comes pre-filtered. Disney decided to create a search engine that kids could use without parent supervision. Every site that is in the Dig.com database has been reviewed by a reviewer at disney.

The site is laid out much like Yahoo. The site is arranged with several main topics on the front page. If you are looking for infomation it would be wise to drill down to limit your search. For example, I tried to perform a search for the St. Louis Cardinal slugger Mark Macguire and Dig.com returned sites concerning the 63rd regiment for the confederate states of america.

Overall the site is good and is certainly fast. It would be a good place for kids to start their exploration of the Web. Kids can use Dig.com with relative ease and have a minimal chance of finding inappropriate material, however the chances are not zero so it is still recommed that for kids someone be with them as they beging their exploration of the web.

2. www.metacrawler.com

This search engine allows you to make an all-at-once submission to Yahoo, Altavista, Infoseek, Excite and a few others. This will give you the top ten results from each source sorted into a single list. Many Web researchers like to being with this "meta search" as a way for getting a feel for the kinds of information available. Thus if you really don't know what you are exactly looking for www.metacrawler.com would be a good place to start.

3. www.searchenginewatch.com

If you are interested to learning more about the search engine wars this site is the place to go. Afterall all the search engines are competing with each other to provide you with the most intelligent results possible. Searchengine.com also provides you with tutorials on Web searching techniques as well as technical details on how each search engine performs its tricks.

4. www.refdesk.com

This is not a search engine but is a useful sight for finding other internet resouces. This site is maintained by a single individual and has won many awards and is highly recommened by professional internet search librarians. It will point you to a long list of specializes Web search engines and to a virtual encylopedia. It also has a list of sites you might want to check every day. The reference desk has a search entry box from which you can search either the site or the entire web

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This page put together by Mike Barnett
Resource help provided by: Bill Kalke, Emjay Coporation