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Search Engine, Search Directory
When it comes to searching the Web, there are plenty of online
services to choose from - HotBot (but of course), Excite, Infoseek,
Yahoo, and AltaVista, to name a few. Each offers its own pros and
cons, and each requires subtly different searching techniques to
really find what you seek. Directories, like Yahoo or Excite, are
expansive catalogs of Web sites that have been intuitively divided
into categories. Think department store - say it's a spatula you
seek. You start by escalating to housewares, then locate the kitchen
section, zero in on utensils, then of the three choices of spatulas,
you select the Goldilocks-perfect pancake flipper. Search engines,
like HotBot or AltaVista, look for any sites containing the keyword
you seek. Even when you narrow the field (with advanced search options),
search engines often produce an overwhelming number of incongruous,
puzzling, or just plain weird sites. But, since they don't have
to manually categorize each site, search engines tend to cover much
more of the Web than do catalogs.
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