Lycos Search Engines

There are many search engines and internet directories, but familiarizing yourself with several major ones will be enough to get your online research off to a good start. The main search engines included in this article are InfoSeek, Yahoo, Excite, HotBot, AltaVista, Lycos and LookSmart; LookSmart and Yahoo are actually large directories rather than true search engines. Even these large commercial search engines and directories have been found to search only a small portion of the Web; however, this is typically enough to help you get to the right webpage that contains the information you are looking for or to a website that contains links to other sites containing information on your subject. Many of the major search engines are also becoming known as "Internet Portals" because they provide a number of popular services for the frequent internet user.

Lycos is another major search engine that is also becoming more of a media site, similar to Excite, Yahoo and InfoSeek. The main web search on Lycos uses a technology called WiseWire which brings up particular pages that pertain to your query and allows users to rate these pages at the same time. These "community guides" will often include some useful sites that you may not have found elsewhere. With Lycos you can also add more options to your search. By clicking on search features or by going to www.lycos.com/search/ you will also find the option of searching within a specific website. For instance, you could search only within the USA Today website by entering www.usatoday.com and then entering your keyword(s).

Lycos also has an advanced search option, dubbed "Lycos Pro." In addition to the options mentioned above, Lycos Pro allows you to rank the importance of different criteria pertaining to your search results including: how close together your keywords should be, how much the results need to match all of your keywords, how important is it for the keywords be part of the title of the webpage and whether the keywords need to appear in the exact order as you entered them in the search box. For each criteria you can select a low, medium or high measure of importance.

The help section on Lycos is detailed and includes screenshots that help you understand what each type of search can do. Lycos will also search for images, sounds and products and search through Usenet postings, message boards, and personal homepages. Lycos also provides web reviews, through its "Top 5% of the Web" service.