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General Search Engines
A general search engine is a search engine that covers the overall Web, usually using its own spider to collect Web pages for its own index. These search engines tend to collect pages from the free Web.
When to use a general search engine
- When you have a well-defined topic or idea to research
- When your topic is obscure
- When you are looking for a specific site
- When you want to search the full text of millions of Web pages
- When you want to retrieve a large number of Web sites on your topic
- When you want to search for particular types of documents, sites, file types, languages, date last modified, geographical location, etc.
Examples of general search engines
This is easy. General search engines have been popular and newsworthy for many years.
When you explore these search engines, notice that each one has something special to offer. Google retrieves results as you type your search in real time. (Google also features all kinds of specialty searches and services - just check out its More Google Products page.) Bing is Microsoft's contribution to general search, and helps you find things by showing you topics related to your search. Yahoo! is an entire portal of information services.
The screenshot below shows you a typical results page on a general search engine, in this case Bing. The search for "global warming" brought back a list of relevant results. Note that the top three results are "Sponsored sites", another name for advertisements. More sponsored sites appear in the right column. Bing gives you the added bonus of related search ideas in the left column.
Let's move on to a consideration of meta search engines >>
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