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General Search Engines
A general search engine is a search engine that covers the overall Web, using its own spider to collect Web pages for its own index.
When to use a general search engine
- When you have a well-defined topic or idea to research
- When your topic is obscure
- When you are looking for a specific site
- When you want to search the full text of millions of Web pages
- When you want to retrieve a large number of Web sites on your topic
- When you want to search for particular types of documents, sites, file types, languages, date last modified, geographical location, etc.
Examples of general search engines
This is easy. General search engines have been popular and newsworthy for many years.
When you explore these search engines, notice that each one has something special to offer. Google features all kinds of special searches and services - just check out its More Google Products page. Yahoo! is an entire portal of information services.
BananaSlug was included in the list above to give you an idea of some of the creative things you might find when you try out a different search engine than the norm. BananaSlug uses the Google index for its results, but also throws in a series of random word categories which you can search for unusual results. In the example below, the initial search was "global warming". The "Great Ideas" category was selected, generating the random concept "logic". Notice that the word "logic" appears in the title of all the results. This search engine is a lot of fun - give it a try!
Let's move on to a consideration of meta search engines >>
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