Searching for things is very common among internet usage.  This article describes several sites.  Many sites are being created while others are loosing their stamina.  Yanoff’s List was the first widely used when it was created in 1991.  Yahoo took it’s place in 1995, and has remained dominant in helping people find what they are looking for.  A newer service for browsing categories of sites is  Open Directory Project.  It is “spearheaded” by Netscape, and has a database useful enough to be licensed by AltaVista, Lycos, Hotbot, MetaCrawler, among some one hundred sites.  Many search engines such as AltaVista are still good at finding narrowly defined information, but Open Directory Project and Yahoo are better at giving broad categories of information.  The hottest search engine of today is Google.  It began in 1999.  It’s technology works so well it is licensed by over one hundred sites.  The author feels it is always better to search more than one site by using a metasearch site.  Examples are Profusion and Metacrawler. Another site is AskMe.  This site is a expert site where people try to find information for you.  There are about three billion web pages on the WWW.  any organizations such as Webby Awards and Best of the Web have awarded many websites to make searching for a search engine a little easier.

 This article mentioned several sites I was familiar with, and several I wasn’t.  I was very interesting to find out just how many sites there are on the WWW.  I can’t imagine being able to examine every one of them.  This article I feel is very useful because is mentions which sites to use, and it also mentions ways to find “surfworthy” sites to use for searching.  I had no idea that there were awards for sites.  This might make searching a little easier. I was also interested to find that other sites list some sites because they have a business relationship with other sites.  This is probably why sometimes we can get a numerous amount of irrelevant sites when we search.