Search Engines

No one search engine or program indexes the entire Internet. Comprehensive search engines use software to "crawl" the Web, creating indexes of millions of pages.  Selective search engines use people to add interesting sites to their collections.  Searches for major sites may be easiest in one of the selective search engines, while searches looking for all possibly relevant sites are best performed in a comprehensive search tool. "Meta-search engines" will perform your search in a number of different search engines at the same time, sometimes sorting all the results into one list.  After selecting an engine, you may want to improve your results by following some basic Internet search techniques.

 Here are some of the major search engines:

Additional Information:

Types of Search Tools
The University of California at Berkeley Libraries' guide to using search engines.

Search Engine Watch
Description of engines plus statistics on how large they are and how often they are used.