Selected Search Engines

These links are offered as a service. The WSBA has no control over the linked sites and make no  promises concerning their value or content.

Search Engines Description and Analysis

http://www.searchenginewatch.com/facts/index.html

http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/features/

http://home.clear.net.nz/pages/research/snoozinf.htm - Meta Search Engine Review

The Hidden Search Engine

Type your search term into the "Address" line of your late-model browser and hit the "enter" key. This engages a search engine built into the browser. It is not the best search engine, but can be the most convenient.

Engines & Portals Specialized for the Legal Field

http://www.findlaw.com/ - concentrates on U.S. materials

http://www.hg.org/ - international materials

http://www.llrx.com/ - Law Library Resource Xchange

http://www.alllaw.com/ 

http://www.catalaw.com/ - a "catalog of catalogs" of law resources

http://www.lawsource.com/also/ - American Law Sources Online

http://www.katsuey.com/ - Katsuey's Legal Gateway

http://www.lawcrawler.com/  - the search engine part of Findlaw

http://www.lexisone.com/ - a free subset of lexis

http://www.prairielaw.com/

http://gsulaw.gsu.edu/metaindex/ - Meta-index for Legal Research

http://www.virtualchase.com/ - the Virtual Chase

http://www.washlaw.edu/ - Washburn U School of Law

General Purpose

Northern Light http://www.northernlight.com/ - organizes results into handy folders. This is especially useful when your search terms have multiple meanings

Google http://www.google.com/ - Not only does this have a large directory and a clever ranking scheme, it lets you look at "cached" pages that may have been removed from the web. Also, it has a government-only search at http://www.google.com/unclesam

http://www.about.com/ - has a lot of anonymous articles - since you don't know who wrote them, you might not be able to rely on them

http://www.altavista.com/ - one of the earliest and best

http://www.alltheweb.com/

http://www.ask.com/ and http://www.askjeeves.com/ - a nice user interface conceals a pernicious feature: you can't easily figure out the URL of the results it produces. This makes it pretty useless for serious research

http://www.completeresults.com/

http://www.debriefing.com/ Allows adding one or more terms to a search creating more focused results.

http://www.directhit.com/

http://dmoz.org// - Netscape's Open Directory Project (ODP) - uses humans to make up categories; is widely used by other engines

http://www.dogpile.com/ - a "metasearch" using other search engines

http://www.excite.com/ 

http://www.google.com/ - note: this engine may cache pages, allowing access to deleted materials!

http://www.hotbot.com/ 

http://huskysearch.cs.washington.edu/ The latest from the University of Washington-based metacrawler.

http://www.infind.com/ Inference lists results grouped by subject, rather than by search engine or in one giant list. It uses Alta Vista, Excite, InfoSeek, Lycos, WebCrawler and Yahoo.

http://www.infoseek.com/ 

http://www.isleuth.com/ Allows you to search the standard search engine choices or a huge number of specialty sites.

http://www.looksmart.com/

http://www.lycos.com/ 

http://www.metacrawler.com/  One of the oldest meta search, MetaCrawler began in July 1995 at the University of Washington.

http://www.momma.com/ -  Uses seven major search engines.

http://www.msn.com/

http://www.northernlight.com/ - organizes results into folders

http://www.oingo.com/ - "meaning-based" searches (e.g. Washington = State, President, DC or county in any of 27 states)

http://www.oneseek.com/ OneSeek displays the results from two or three search engines side-by-side.

http://www.puresearch.com/ Enter a query then select a search engine from those listed and the results will pop up in a new window.

http://profusion.ittc.ukans.edu/ Allows searches of up to six major search engines and provides broken link detection.

http://www.thrall.org/proteus.html Enter a search term then click on the name of one of the many search engines listed. The results from that engine will appear

http://www.snap.com/search/power/form/0,179,home-0,00.html

http://www.webcrawler.com/ 

http://www.yahoo.com/ 

Searching Within A Particular TLD or Site

Some search engines will let you search within a particular website, even if that website doesn't have a built-in search engine, but including the "site" term. For example, try the following with google:.

Restrict search to "gov" websites: site:gov 
Example: "site:gov family"

Restrict search to "wa.gov" websites: site:wa.gov 
Example: "site:wa.gov family"

Restrict search to "courts.wa.gov" websites: site:courts.wa.gov 
Example: "site:courts.wa.gov family"

Research about the Web

http://www.domainstats.com/ - how many domain names of each type there are, etc.

http://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois - who owns a domain name?