Information Literacy Learning Guides
Search Engines
Finding the appropriate of 'best' search engine for you particular information need can be frustrating. There are three basic types of search engines. Choosing the type of search to meet your specific needs is the first step to finding valid information.

Types of Search Engines

1. General Search Engines or Free text. If you're looking for a specific piece of information, go to a general search engine such as Google or to a specialized database such as Voice of the Shuttle (for humanities research) or the Bureau of the Census (for statistics).
 
Advantages Disadvantages 
  • Offers much larger searchable databases of web sites. 
  • The full text of individual web pages is often searchable.  
  • Great for searching very obscure terms or phrases. 
  • No human quality control to weed out problems, duplicates, junk. 
  •  The huge size of the database can lead to unmanageably high numbers of search results. 
  •  Search command languages can often be complex and confusing. 

2. Subject Search Engines or category. If you're browsing and trying to determine what's available in your subject area, start out by selecting a subject directory like Yahoo! or a human-powered directory which depends on humans for its listings. A search looks for matches only in the descriptions submitted.
 
Advantages Disadvantages 
  • Similar types of websites grouped together 
  • Human intercession provides a level of filtering and quality control - often carefully evaluated & annotated. 
  •  Subject designations may be arbitrary, confusing or wrong. 
  • Never contains full text of the web they link to - you can only search what you see titles, descriptions, subject categories, etc.
  • Human-labor intensive process limits database currency, size,rate of growth and timeliness. 

3. Meta Search Engines. If you are looking for all the information you can find on a subject, try a Meta search engine such as Metacrawler use more than one search engine to search a single search query simultaneously.
 
Advantages Disadvantages 
  • No need to re-type your search at a number of sites. 
  • A great way to decide which sites to search in depth.

 
 

 
  • The default search mode differs from search site to search site, so the same search is not always appropriate in different search engine software. 
  • Often like one stop shopping - good idea but often overwhelming. 
 
 

 


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 Last Updated: 8/2/04