Portals, Directories, & Search Engines

Search Engines: Indexing the words on every page in their database, a search engine covers Web pages and can include billions of pages.

Portals: Offer web search databases, other databases, possibly a directory, and many other general services such as email, free home page building, news, popular topics, etc. Well-known portals include Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, and iGoogle.

Directory Function: A subject directory includes selected Web sites (more often than pages) and classifies them into hierarchical subject categories. Most portals have one and some specialized directories are available by themselves. They do not index every word on every page included.

Use the portals, directories, and search engines for finding the Web site of organizations when you can't guess the URL.

Selected Search Engines:

• Google is a large, very popular search engine
• Yahoo! is another large search engine and a good alternate to Google
• Live Search is the third major search engine from Microsoft

• LII (The Librarians' Index to the Internet) is a non-commercial directory
• Infomine is an academic directory from UC-Riverside
  
• Yahoo! Directory is one of the oldest
• Wikipedia can function like a directory. Look at the External Links at the bottom of an articles, as well as its references.

• Yahoo! is a portal with a  search engine and directory
• Personalized Google is now available as a portal
• Others include AOL and MSN

Now let's try the