Searching the Web

Most people will have heard of the Google search engine, but there are hundreds of others. How do they work?

I use the ones below to find information on the Web

World Wide Web Sites

I find ixquick easy-to-use and gives uncluttered results.

You can use Ixquick directly from this page.

Ixquick

Yahoo

UK Web Sites Only

Web Finder

Mirago

Maps

Streetmap

Multimap

Address

Hopewiser

Phone numbers

Business & Residential

BT phonebook

Reverse phone number look up

Ixquick Reverse Phone Number

Dictionary

HyperDic

How do they work?

The World Wide Web contains a vast amount of information (billions of pages), which makes finding what you want on your own exceedingly difficult.

Search engines (Google Yahoo, etc) work like an index in an ordinary book. They regularly, daily to monthly, look at every web site and list those that they think might be useful. When you use them they look through the pages they have indexed and give you a link and brief description of the pages that contained the words you entered in the search box. Their costs are usually paid for by sponsors and adverts (this may lead to biased results or even exclusion of their competitor's sites).

Example;
If you typed in "Somerset" they will find all the pages that they have listed that contained the word "Somerset", and they are likely to find many millions of pages, today 31,699,396! (not very useful!)

Adding more words to the search by typing in "somerset dyslexia association" with the quotes they search only for pages containing the phrase "Somerset Dyslexia Association" (today 30).

But without the quotes most search for "Somerset" "dyslexia" and "association" as separate words in any order of anywhere on the page, (today 4,160) so remember to use the quotes when you are looking for a phrase.

"Ixquick" is a rather different search engine (meta search), instead of keeping its own list this one uses several other search engines. It only returns the top ten results from each search engine, with very few adverts or sponsored sites. I always use this one first as I think it is very clearly laid out, quick and easy-to-use.
For convenience I have put a Ixquick search engine box in the links above.

Visitors