How can I search through ALL web sites?
Several people have written robots which create indexes of web sites --
including sites which have not arranged to be mentioned in the
newspapers and catalogs above. (Before writing your own robot,
please read the entry in the authoring
section regarding robots.)
Here are a few such automatic indexes you can search:
- Alta Vista
- (URL is <URL:http://www.altavista.digital.com> ) is
probably the most powerful web searching facility at this time,
with an exhaustive database and the capability to search
USENET newsgroups as well as web sites. The query language
is also powerful.
- Yahoo
- (URL is <URL:http://www.yahoo.com/> ) is probably
the most complete hierarchical, topical index of web sites, and
also features a sophisticated search facility.
-
Lycos
- (URL is <URL:http://fuzine.mt.cs.cmu.edu/mlm/lycos-home.html> ) is another
web-indexing robot, which includes the ability to submit the URLs of
your own documents by hand, ensuring that they are available for
searching.
-
WebCrawler
-
(URL is <URL:http://webcrawler.com.html> )
builds an impressively complete index; on the other
hand, since it indexes the content of documents, it may find many
links that aren't exactly what you had in mind. However, it does a good
job of sorting the documents it finds according to how closely they
match your search.
-
World Wide Web Worm
- (URL is http://www.cs.colorado.edu/home/mcbryan/WWWW.html )
builds its index based on page titles and URL contents only.
This is somewhat less inclusive, but pages it finds are more likely
to be an exact match with your needs.
- InfoSeek
- <URL:http://www.infoseek.com/> is a commercial search
service which also offers a
free web search facility <URL:http://www2.infoseek.com>.
You can specify phrases to locate, among other query operations, and
InfoSeek's commercial service can search more than just web pages
(newsgroups, for instance).
InfoSeek's commercial service charges 10 cents per query and offers a
free trial to new users. (Increasing load on the free search
servers makes this sound better every day.)
- OpenText
- (URL is <URL:http://www.opentext.com> ) also offers a robust
web searching facility.
You can read about other search robots and the principles behind them in the
robots section.
World Wide Web FAQ