How to Search the Internet

WWW

	There are lots of search engines available, and they don't all index quite the same pages in quite the same ways. Here is a small sampling. Alta Vista Excite Infoseek Internet Sleuth Lycos Mother-of-all-BBS's WWW Worm Yahoo There are also many meta-search engines. That is, places that will search many different engines for you in one click. Here is a large list of: Meta-Search engines from Yahoo

Gopher

	VERONICA can search for keywords in titles of gopher documents on servers throughout the world. The search is done at a remote server, and can be very slow during prime time.

WAIS

WAIS servers let you search the full text of component databases for keywords. But instead of returning exact matches, WAIS tries to rank documents depending on the number of hits obtained, and returns a "fuzzy" list of documents, possibly in the order of importance. Often one will query a WAIS directory of servers first to find the appropriate WAIS server, and then make the real query.

NCSA runs a WAIS gateway that can query several different sets of WAIS servers.

Another set of WAIS servers, gatewayed through gopher, is maintained at Brown University.

Anonymous FTP

	Many files on the internet are available for anonymous FTP. Here is a list of ftp servers, as well as an ARCHIE search server that lets you find the particular ftp server that has the software you are looking for.

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