This is a difficult and tricky question to answer, for I have found that I need to use several on particular problems. Therefore, I would warn you never to rely on any one search engine. All search engines are not the same in the number of hits they will return on any topic, nor are all search the same in terms of the different kinds of information they might hold.

Cleary, search engines do differ: For example, when I search through WebCrawler for my name, I get five hits; when I search through AltaVista, I get 349 hits; and when I search through HotBot, I get over 600 hits. Why the difference? WebCrawler for the most part counts on people submitting their URLs, whereas AltaVista and HotBot continuously search on their own--they've got Bots to look for them!--through websites, indexing everything in their database. There is a difference!

Return to Appendix A.