Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources Guide
Recommended resources for Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources

Search Engines

About Search Engines

Search engines use automated programs called robots or spiders to travel from site to site, checking for new Web pages and compiling an index. Some search engines use the full text of each page to put together an index, others just use keywords. When the user enters a keyword or phrase into a search engine, the terms are checked against the index. Search engines often retrieve a large number of results and many of them may be irrelevant. Most search engines have an advanced search option that allows the user to refine their search.

There are search engines specifically designed to search for information within the Australasian domains (.au and .nz), and meta search engines, which allow the user to search many search engines simultaneously.

There are thousands of search engines available for you to use. To identify relevant search engines for a particular topic try Beaucoup! a directory of thousands of search engines.

Australian Specific Search Engines

This group of search engines allows the user to search within Australia and/or New Zealand, or worldwide. Where a major search engine has an Australasian version, it has been included in this category and omitted from the general category. It is important to note that some sites providing Australasian information are not hosted within Australia or New Zealand (ie do not have .au or .nz in their URL) so would not be retrieved in this type of restricted search.

AltaVista Australia
AltaVista has a range of advanced searching options which allow the user to refine a search to retrieve fewer irrelevant hits. The service provides support for multi-lingual searching and also includes Babel Fish, a machine translation service that can translate words, phrases or Web sites in English to and from Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian and Russian. AltaVista also indexes multimedia content. Help information is available on the site.

AltaVista New Zealand
AltaVista has a range of advanced searching options which allow the user to refine a search to retrieve fewer irrelevant hits. The service provides support for multi-lingual searching and also includes Babel Fish, a machine translation service that can translate words, phrases or Web sites in English to and from Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian and Russian. AltaVista also indexes multimedia content. Help information is available on the site.

Anzwers
Anzwers provides the option of restricting a search to web sites within Australia or New Zealand or searching anywhere in the world.

Research Finder
Research Finder is produced by the Australian Department of Industry, Science and Resources. It searches an index compiled from research organisations' web sites in Australia including selected universities, Cooperative Research Centres and other government funded units.

Web Wombat
This search engine allows the user to limit searches to Australia and New Zealand only, or search internationally. An advanced search option is available. Check the help pages for search tips.

Subject Specific Search Engines

Scirus
Scirus is a science search engine produced by Elsevier Science. It indexes scientific, technical and medical information, including both free and access controlled resources, for which either a paid subscription or an online registration is required. Scirus also reads and indexes non-text files such as .pdf and postscript. Advanced search and search tips options are available.

Web-agri
Maintained by Hyltel Multimédia, France, Web-agri is an agricultural search engine.

International Search Engines

alltheweb
alltheweb consistently offers one of the largest collections of web pages. Various specialised search functions are available via the advanced search screen, such as options to search for multimedia, WAP, PDA, FTP and MP3 files. alltheweb is a great place to start when looking for information in PDF documents as (unlike other search engines) it indexes the full text of the complete document. Help information is available on the site for more effective searching.

Ask Jeeves
Ask Jeeves uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) that allows you to can enter a search in question format. "With NLP, Jeeves is able to understand the context of what you are asking, and he can thus to offer you answers and search suggestions in the same human terms in which we all communicate." You can also search Ask Jeeves in the usual way by using keywords. An Advanced search is also available.

Gigablast
Gigablast is a search engine built and operated by sole proprietor Matt Wells. Gigablast's scoring algorithms give less emphasis to links compared to other search engines, so that new sites are not at as much a disadvantage as more established sites that have a large number of incoming links. The Gigablast index is continually updated and refreshed in real-time. You can also add and update your URLs in real-time.

Google
Google is a search engine that makes use of link popularity as a way to rank web sites. This can be helpful when looking for sites in response to general searches such as "cars" or "travel". Google searches for information in a range of file types including .pdf, .ps, .xls, .ppt, .doc, .rtf, and .txt as well as html sources. Google has recently added wildcards to phrase searching. For example if you searched for "three * mice" Google would find three blind mice ,three green mice, three white mice etc. The wildcard (*) cannot be used for part of a word. Google also has a feature that allows translation of Italian, French, Spanish, German and Portuguese web pages into English. An advanced search option and search tips are available. The Google Help:Cheat Sheet outlines a range of Google features.

Hotbot
HotBot is produced by Lycos. A subject directory is available from the homepage created from the Open Directory Project, where volunteers index web sites in an area of interest. HotBot offers advanced searching features which allows tailoring of searches to retrieve more relevant results. Limits include media format and geographic region, including a limit for Australian or New Zealand sites. Search Help is available on the site.

MSN Search
The search engine from the Microsoft Corporation. An option to limit to Australian material is available. Help is also available.

TEOMA
Teoma is a relatively new search engine that was purchased by Ask Jeeves in late 2001. The search results page displays the following 3 choices:

Expert links are identified by analyzing the structure of the Web. Teoma looks at who links to whom and they are able to identify communities - clusters of Web pages and sites that are connected in some important way. From that analysis they identify sites that stand out as authorities in any given community. An advanced search option is available.

WiseNut
WiseNut is another relatively new search engine that began in Asia. Wisenut automatically categorizes results into wiseguides that are semantically related to the words in your query. Try WiseSearch: the advanced search option.

Meta search engines

Dogpile
Dogpile simultaneously searches a variety of search engines, directories and specialty search sites. Help information and advanced search commands are available.

Ithaki
Ithaki is available in 14 languages and provides more than 35 categories to metasearch. Ithaki offers country specific searching, using some global engines but also independent directories and local search engines. Help and FAQ pages are provided.

Ixquick
Ixquick ranks search results based on the number of "top 10" rankings a site receives from a range of search engines. A Hints and Help section is provided in addition to Power search techniques.

Mamma
Mamma simultaneously searches a variety of search engines, subject directories, and deep content sites. An advanced search (power search) option and search tips are available. Mamma also provides you with the facility to email your search results.

MetaCrawler
MetaCrawler searches a range of the major search engines simultaneously, retrieves search results from across the Internet and organises them in a uniform format, ranks them by relevance and allows the user to access similar sites with a "more like this" option. Advanced search commands are available. Check the search tools and tips page for information about searching and customising the service.

Vivisimo
Vivisimo is a new service from a group of academics at Carnegie Mellon University that aims "to change the way search results are displayed." Vivísimo does not crawl or index the web, its focus is on organizing the outputs of other search engines. It is more properly seen as a clustering engine. An advanced search option is provided and help information is available on the site for more effective searching.

KartOO
"KartOO is a metasearch engine with visual display interfaces. When you click on OK, KartOO launches the query to a set of search engines, gathers the results, compiles them and represents them in a series of interactive maps through a proprietary algorithm."

Specialist search engines

FaganFinder - Image search engines
Created by Michael Fagan, this website features numerous search tools and external links. Users can search for images, video and audio files.

Picsearch
Picsearch is a specialised search engine for pictures and images only. The advanced search function allows the user to refine the search by selecting colour or black and white, image or animation, and picture size.

Singingfish
Singingfish is a multimedia search engine. It is designed to track audio and video files. The advanced search option allows the user to search by subject area and/or file type.

FindSounds
FindSounds is a specialized search engine for sound effects and musical instrument samples. Unlike some other multimedia search services FindSounds is limited to simple sounds and short samples. Help is available.