Search Engines

IE4 links to five popular search engine providers. These five search engines take turns at being the featured provider-of-the-day. The provider-of-the-day receives the privilege of being the first engine you see when you open the Search page. Those Microsoft people are so diplomatic!

To change the provider in your Search page:

Click on the pull-down menu.

Move your mouse to highlight a provider.

Click your mouse to select it.

Just click to change to another provider

The five search engines in IE4 aren't the only ones available. There are specialized engines to help you find phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and newsgroup postings. But we'll save that for some other time. For now, you probably just want to know more about the five featured engines in IE4.

Search Providers in IE4

Provider Gain to Fame Mo'Jo's Remarks

Yahoo Organizes web sites by category. Got nothing to do? Select a category you want to explore and follow the trail of links. Who knows what you'll find.

Lycos Lists all web pages that contain the word you specified. In my hunt for the perfect date, I typed the word monitors into Lycos. Result: 35,891 links. Yikes! I tried cute monitors and received 234 links. Moral of the story: Be specific with Lycos!

Infoseek Searches newsgroup messages, but also does a good job with web pages. If mega-lists of links scare you, then you'll like Infoseek. This engine only shows you 50 of the closest matches.

Excite Summarizes web sites with a short write-up. Select the small gray button next to each link to see a site summary. If you like what you see, select the "more like this" link for a list of similar sites.

AOL NetFind Does the same thing as Excite because IT IS Excite. Yes, you are seeing double. AOL NetFind and Excite are exactly the same. Maybe good things come in twos.

TIP
Who said anything about mind-reading?

When entering keywords into a search engine, think of words that the person who produced the page would use. For example, if you type cats, you will receive a list of pages with warm, fuzzy descriptions of the household pet. If you type feline, you will receive a list of scientific jargon on pet diseases and vaccinations. meOW!

Search Providers in IE4
Provider	Gain to Fame	Mo'Jo's Remarks
Yahoo	Organizes web sites by category.	Got nothing to do? Select a category you want to explore and follow the trail of links. Who knows what you'll find.
Lycos	Lists all web pages that contain the word you specified.	In my hunt for the perfect date, I typed the word monitors into Lycos. Result: 35,891 links. Yikes! I tried cute monitors and received 234 links. Moral of the story: Be specific with Lycos!
Infoseek	Searches newsgroup messages, but also does a good job with web pages.	If mega-lists of links scare you, then you'll like Infoseek. This engine only shows you 50 of the closest matches.
Excite	Summarizes web sites with a short write-up.	Select the small gray button next to each link to see a site summary. If you like what you see, select the "more like this" link for a list of similar sites.
AOL NetFind	Does the same thing as Excite because IT IS Excite.	Yes, you are seeing double. AOL NetFind and Excite are exactly the same. Maybe good things come in twos.