The Editors' Choice-winning Northern Light has gained attention for the way it attempts to presort search returns, grouping them into folders based on where they came from and what they are. That strategy gives you a good top-level look at what you've found and can save you time. The site is also notable for its special collections, information from over 4,500 business magazines, trade journals, news wires, and academic journals that you can't find anywhere else online. (Reading an article from the collection usually costs about $1.)

Yahoo

A part of the fledgling Go2Net network, MetaCrawler takes your search request and runs it against AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Thunderstone, Webcrawler, and Yahoo! to return a single list of results from every corner of the Web. Though you can't fine-tune your requests to the extent you can at some of the other search sites, you can use MetaCrawler to make a very fast sweep of the Web to see if you're on the right track. Also available: MetaSpy, to see what other people are searching for.

Google: Here's your chance to search the Web and participate in high-level academic research at the same time. Google! is a Stanford University project designed to find the most relevant Web pages (those with the most inbound links) and run searches against them. The 25 million pages currently catalogued seem to be good choices; the site has an uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results. There's much more to come at Google!, but even in its prototype form it's a great search engine.

Excite

HotBot is now part of The Lycos Network, but its new home hasn't changed its purpose or functionality. Users turn to it for fast, accurate searches that return results by relevance. Special features abound. You can search within a specified date range, and you can do a second search against the results of your first search. Searches in specific areas such as sports and entertainment are powered by specialty sites that have made deals with HotBot. The results: better search returns. HotBot remains the versatility leader among search engines.

AltaVista is still the best brute force Web search engine, but these days it's putting on a prettier face. A redesign last fall brought many more features, including a fascinating Photo Finder that helps you search for images on the Web and a Family Filter to keep your searching clean. The search engine has also gotten much better at answering plain-English queries such as "Where can I find a map of Ethiopia?" The foreign language translator is still in place, as are an increasing number of categories that you can dive into with cascading menus.

Lycos

Encyclopedia Britannica - Very highly regarded comprehensive Web -Searching engine based on the academic structure of an encyclopedia.

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