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Featured Searches
Canadian Search Engines
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AltaVista Canada |
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This is the Canadian web site for AltaVista. The deafault search is already set to "find results in Canada", which is convienient. This site appears to have the most Canadian content, which is probably due to their being one of the very first to offer a Canadian version of their search engine. |
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Canadian, Eh? |
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A suprisingly good source for searching Canadian web sites; however, keep your searches simple, since there isn't a great deal of content here, right now. |
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Google Canada |
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This is the Canadian web site for Google. Note: the default search is set to search "the web", so you must click on the radio button for "pages from Canada each time you use this site". |
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Search Canada |
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No banner ads, no flash, no directories and not much content at all. Just a simple search engine providing Candian only content. |
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Yahoo Canada |
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This is the Canadian web site for Yahoo. Default search is Canada, just type and search or use their directory. |
All Web Search Engines
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4Anything |
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4Anything is a network of web guides that help users easily find high quality, relevant information online for thousands of topics of interest and cities. Each guide helps users focus their searching via a well-organized, highly manageable list of recommended sites for a given topic along with valuable commentary on each site. It has very limited Canadian content but if your think of traveling to the US its an excellent place to start planning your next holiday there; otherwise you can take a visual only holiday and browse through their highly organized selection of search results. |
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About |
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Each site in this unique network is run by a professional Guide who is carefully screened and trained by About. Guides build a comprehensive environment around each of their specific topics, including the best new content, relevant links, How-To's, Forums, and answers to just about any question. The About network consists of hundreds of Guide sites neatly organized into channels. The sites cover more than 50,000 subjects with over 1 million links to the best resources on the Net and the fastest-growing archive of high quality original content. Topics range from pregnancy to cars, palm pilots to painting, weight loss to video game strategies. No one has greater depth and breadth than About. |
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Acedemic Info |
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Academic Info is a nonprofit tax-exempt organization. The mission of Academic Info is to be the premier educational gateway to high school, college and research level Internet resources. Academic Info selects, organizes, and reviews quality educational websites to make the increasing avalanche of information on the Internet accessible to students in an easy to use online directory. |
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AOL |
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Search engine provided by AOL, and as you would suspect, their own content is heavily promoted; however, it does provide a vast wealth of well organized information. |
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All Search Engines |
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Not only is there a search engine on this site, but it is very informative place to go to find out about the topic of search engines. Most of the major sites are linked, and topical search engines are listed as well (e.g. career, education, games and music). |
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All The Web |
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Search web pages, news articles, pictures, videos mp3 files, and ftp files in many differnet languages. Also there are some speciality search solutions for scientific or soccer information. |
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AltaVista |
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AltaVista is the premier search engine on the web. It has the largest, most inclusive indices. That does not mean it is the only one you need, or in all situations the best one to use. Different robot and indexing strategies have resulted in different results when using the various search engines. AltaVista, however, returns consistently useful information, but since no editorial decisions have been made regarding content, it also has the largest "noise to signal" ratio. |
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Ask Jeeves |
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Search with words, phrases or questions. Just type in a few words, like on other search engines, or ask a question. Jeeves searches the web and gives you results that help you find what you're looking for. |
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Business.com |
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The business search engine. |
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Digital Librarian |
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A directory of web sites maintained by Margaret Vail Anderson, a librarian in Cortland, New York. |
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Excite |
It's too bad that there is no longer a Canadian version of this site, since it provides the most flexibility to deliver a personalized home page, providing you with your own sports, business news, weather, horoscope, favourite links, and customized television listings all on one screen. Its new owners chose not to provide the Canadian content, but if we were interested in US only content on our home page, we would use this site.
Excite uses a combination of text and subject indices to search either by keyword or by concept. Concept searches, according to the Excite authors, find documents related to the idea of your search, and not just documents explicitly containing the search terms you enter.
From the initial screen you choose which way you would like to search, by clicking the keyword or concept radio button. Concept is the default. You may search web documents, reviews, usenet newsgroups or classifieds. Simple or more advanced features are entered in the same search box. There are not separate entry screens for either type of search, but advanced features like boolean searching and logical grouping are supported. You may not control the appearance of the hit list into standard/summary/detailed formats as you can with some other search engines. |
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FileSearching |
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Searches FTP servers for filename, directory name, images, music and video files. FTP servers are File Transfer Protocol servers that host files available for the public to download. They are different from a peer-to-peer file sharing program, because you only need to have a web browser installed to be able to download the files. |
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Google |
Funny name for a search engine, but it's often the one we use first. Almost every topic is listed, and often the most relevant are near the top of the list. The main page is almost completely bare, with only one graphic image and a few dozen words, which links to their other sections. What is very useful abotut this search engine is the web pages are all cached; meaning they have actually stored a copy of all the web pages in their database, which means if a web site is down or no longer available you will find a copy of their web page as it was the last time Google scanned it, justed by clicking on the Cached link at the bottom of each search result.
The picture search is the best We've ever seen, because what they have done is listed all the images that are found in the web sites that they have catalogued for their web searches. Image searching is very fast, and provides links to the original web site, so you can actually find web sites by the name of an image (e.g. flwr results in lots of pictures of flowers). It's also a good place to access newsgroups for those that haven't gotten around to installing a news reader program. |
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InfoPlease |
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This page is provided by the Learning Network and features search results from encyclopedia, atlas, dictionary and almanac sources. |
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Kids Click |
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KidsClick! was created by a group of librarians at the Ramapo Catskill Library System, as a logical step in addressing concerns about the role of public libraries in guiding their young users to valuable and age appropriate web sites. |
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Librarian's Index to the Internet |
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"Information You Can Trust." Librarians' Index to the Internet is a searchable, annotated subject directory of more than 10,000 Internet resources selected and evaluated by librarians for their usefulness to users of public libraries. The Librarian's Index to the Internet is used by both librarians and the general public as a reliable and efficient guide to Internet resources. |
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LookSmart |
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Boasting that they're the Internet's most targeted advertising and listings network, the results are obviously very commercially oriented. Searching here could hurt your pocket book because the advertising is geared towards to topic of your search. For example search for X-Files and the product column on the right side of the screen offers videos for sale. |
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Lycos |
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Having been around a long time, this search engine can be found in many flavours around the web. This is their main site, and with some effort you can minimize the advertising content, and streamline a home page that offers customizable US only content. Their search capabilities offer both keyword and subject searching (the subject searches are called directory services), as well as a Point rating system which rates web pages. Its strong points are its speed, ease of use, and the large size of its indices, which often produce usable results by sheer brute force. Its weakest point is that it does not support boolean searching or any of the more sophisticated searches. |
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MSN Search |
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This is Microsoft's offering to the search engine realm with an automatic spell checker. A Fast vast wealth of information, but it may be a little overwhelming for beginners, since it takes a while to figure out how to setup the right search request to filter out the unwanted results. Advanced searches include images, audio, video, mp3, audio, ActiveX, VBScript, Shockwave, Acrobat, JavaScript and Java applets. |
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NerdWorld |
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What else can we say this is a search engine for computer nerds. |
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Netscape |
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Netscape offers a search page that is powered by Google . |
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Open Directory Project |
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This is a heavily monitored search engine. The Open Directory Project is a web directory of Internet resources. A web directory is something akin to a huge reference library. The directory is hierarchically arranged by subject from broad to specific. It is maintained by community of thousands of editors who evaluate sites for inclusion in the directory. They are experts in their fields, and all web site submissions are subject to editor evaluation. |
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Overture |
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Some search engine web sites charge hundreds of dollars for a listing high up in their directory. On Overtures web site advertisers pay for actual visitors. The "cost to advertiser" is the amount an Overture advertiser chooses to pay each time a customer clicks that advertiser's listing in their search results. You can actually see how much the advertiser is giong to pay for you to click on their link. Scroll down the search results past the paying sites to find the non-commercial sites. |
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Search.com |
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CNET's search engine can search the web or it can search for content within their own network of web sites. |
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SearchEngineWatch |
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This is not a search engine, but it's listed here because if it is related to search engines in some way, you'll find it here on this site. They offer search engine news, reviews comparing search engines, tips to learn how to search better and how major search engines work from a searcher's perspective. |
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Teoma |
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This site was purchased by Ask Jeeves, which was vey impressed with its "One Search Three Responses" approach. Each search provides "Results" of relevant web pages, "Refine" suggestions to narrow your search and "Resource" link collections from experts and enthusiasts. |
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Vivisimo |
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They believe that they have designed a software solution that does not rely on human intervention to weed out the crap and categorize the the content, normally done by thousands of editors on other search engines. They use a specially developed heuristic algorithm based on an old artificial intelligence idea: a good document grouping is one which possesses a good, readable description. So the only content that will be displayed is one that is very relevant to the specific topic. In other words If you're looking for specific pages and can formulate an accurate query, then use a regular search engine. If you can't, or if you're looking for an overview or just browsing, then try Vivísimo. |
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Yahoo |
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Yahoo claims not to be a search engine, but strictly a heirarchically arranged subject index. It has been developed over a long time, resulting in what effectively becomes a search that shows very well refined results. Browsing Yahoo is the best way to surf for good sites when you don't know (or perhaps care) where exactly you are going. It is also the best way to find good 'starter' sites, from which you can branch out to more specailized ones. Yahoo will return three types of information: 1) Yahoo categories that match the search term (so you can explore them for cross referencing); 2) Actual matching end-sites; and 3) The Yahoo categories from which the various pages are indexed--sort of a 'much broader term' cross reference. |
Meta Search Engines
- A Meta Search Engine is one that actually searches other search engines, displaying a few results from each. When you are not sure which search engine is going to produce any useful results, try a Meta Search Engine first, and see which search engine is returning good results on a particular topic.
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Dog Pile |
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Many times we have searched for something that was resulting in no results found responses from each of the search engines we were using, and when we plugged the search into Dog Pile we found a search engine that was producing links. |
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Highway 61 |
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One of the first on the web, having started in 1996. |
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Ithaki's Metasearch Directory |
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It searches in other search engines simultaneously, removes the duplicates, ranks the results and shows them in one page!. Ithaki also let you find MP3s, images, web cams, web radios, Canadian sites, online books, and newsgroup in their advanced search. |
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Mamma |
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The mother of all search engines. Mamma.com is a "smart" metasearch engine - every time you type in a query Mamma simultaneously searches a variety of engines, directories, and deep content sites, properly formats the words and syntax for each, compiles their results in a virtual database, eliminates duplicates, and displays them in a uniform manner according to relevance. |
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Metacrawler |
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Searches the Internet's top search engines such as AltaVista, Direct Hit, Looksmart and About. With one single, powerful search engine, you get the most comprehensive results. |
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Webcrawler |
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Web, News and Photo search options. |
Phone or Address Search
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411 Directory |
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411.ca - Find a person, Find a Businerss, Reverse Lookup, Maps and Directions. |
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Canada Post |
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If you need a Canadian postal code, for an address, there is no better place to go to find the information than the source. |
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Google Maps |
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Google now has their own mapping service. View locations by street mapping or by resizeable satellite view. After setting your default location you can find a business (eg. by searching for pizza), and get directions both to the restaurant or from the restaurant back to your default location. |
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Map Blast |
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This is a good source to get a map of anywhere in the world. |
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Map Quest |
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This is the main site for MapQuest where you can get a map for an: Address, Airport, ZIP Code, City, Area Code, Lat / Long, or Road Atlas Key. |
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Phone Directories Company |
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This is the other phone directory that arrives on our doorstep for free here in many parts of the province. They have an online version of their directory for Searching. They are not associated with any telephone services provider, they just provide us with phone books that include things like reverse number lookups. |
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SuperPages |
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The phone directory business is a big part of the internet; however, most are based in the US, and it's not easy to find a good quality Canadian directory. This one is provided by Verizon, out of the US; however, they are associated with Telus, as you will notice our local phone books are no longer called the Telus Pages, but rather they're now called the SuperPages. |
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Telus Maps |
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This is a good source to get a map of an address in the lower mainland. The maps are powered by MapQuest. |
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YellowPages |
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Our eastern friends in Canada are represented by this site, so if your looking for eastern Canadian contacts, then check their site out. Sympatico-Lycos Inc., is a Canadian Web communications, commerce and media company which owns and operates a Network of national and local Canadian internet media properties, including sympatico.ca, tripod.ca, calgaryplus.ca, edmontonplus.ca, montrealplus.ca, quebecplus.ca, vancouverplus.ca and toronto.com (owned in partnership with Torstar Corp.), canada411.ca and yellowpages.ca. They provide, through its Network of properties, an integrated collection of local, national and global Internet content, as well as several products and services, including Web search (powered by Google) and directory services, Internet communication and personalization features, personal Web publishing, and various other Internet-based products and services for the consumer and small-office/home office market in Canada. Its owned 71% by Bell Globemedia Inc. and 29% by Lycos, Inc. of Boston Massachussetts. |
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Windows Live Local |
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Microsoft has now started a beta mapping service. Plan your routes, organize your links, and more with these powerful new features: Collections Keep lists of important locations, order them any way you want, and share with friends. Favourites Save collections to your Windows Live Favourites. |
Torrent Search
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BitTorrent |
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BitTorrent is a peer-assisted, digital content delivery platform that provides the fastest, most efficient means of distributing, discovering, and consuming large, high-quality files on the Web. Their mission is simple: to deliver the content that entertains and informs the digital world.
They have a Search option for torrents with listings of: the size of the download, number of files, number of seeders (uploaders) and number of peers (downloaders) for each torrent. |
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myBittorrent |
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Featuring Top 10 lists of the day with torrent search engine or locate in their directory torrents with listings of: the size of the download, number of files, number of seeders (uploaders) and number of peers (downloaders) for each torrent. |
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Torrent Reactor |
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Search or locate in their directory torrents with listings of: the size of the download, number of files, number of seeders (uploaders) and number of peers (downloaders) for each torrent. |
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Torrent Spy |
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Search or locate in their directory torrents with listings of: the size of the download, number of files, number of seeders (uploaders) and number of peers (downloaders) for each torrent. |
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