Hidden Universes of Information on the Internet
	Specialized Search Engines

The well-known search engines (e.g. Yahoo, Lycos, AltaVista ) are generic. They have no particular topic that they care about. They would just assume add a link for "Bee Collecting" as they would for "World Politics" There are many value-added search engines that concentrate on a specific topic. In this section I highlight some of these search engines to clearly illustrate how these specialty search engines can outperform the generic Lycos and AltaVista when it comes to some kinds of information.

You are invited to try these specialized resources. When you get the results from one of these sites, think if you would have been able to even get the same information from Lycos and AltaVista

• Mapquest - Locate any street address in the entire US. There interactive atlas will display a map of the address and can even indicate the nearest hotels or Chinese restaurants near an address. The "Tripquest" option determines the driving instructions between any 2 cities to the nearest .1 miles.
• Switchboard - Look-up any listed residential or business phone number in the United States. Try Anywho to look up all your neighbors (based on street) or to do a reverse look-up. For other phone books around the world, check out this list of international telephone directories
• Library of Congress - Full text searching of current and past legislation.
• Government Printing Office - The GPO provides GPO Access for advanced search capabilities of the Federal Register and other key resources.
• City Net - A subject tree (like Yahoo) where the web links are organized by Geography. Includes linkages to many local governments, tourism, chambers of commerce, etc.
• Four11 - Looking for someone's email? This database of email addresses probably has it (One of the easiest method's to get a friend's email is to pick up the phone and ask them :-)
• Amazon Books - extensive information on over 2 million books

To look at hundreds of other specialized search engines explore Search.com and the All-in One Site. Both of these sites point to hundreds of other search engines, and they have grouped the search engines based on what subjects they cover.
 

Towards the future..
All of these resources involve you making repeated queries to their ever-changing database. Some sites also give you the capability to define a profile for yourself , and be automatically notified when a related change occurs. This helps relieve the burden of a user having to repeatedly visit a site. The ultimate example of automatic online delivery is Pointcast. Think of Pointcast. as a personalized CNN news service. With Pointcast, you download free client software which you then configure with information you are interested in (company names, industries, weather, sports, etc) Your Pointcast will then retrieve current news (Reuters, AP, stock prices) for your profile. If you have not seen Pointcast, go to their web site now and try their free client. This is the wave of the future.  If you can't use Pointcast in your work environment, you may want try web-based alternatives such as my.yahoo.com.

There are also numerous search agents  described at botspot.

Note for my Alumni: Your referrals are always appreciated