Searching the Internet

The meta-search engines at Nexor and NCSA allow you to choose multiple search tools from one place. At NEXOR, CUSI replaced SUSI II, but you must have a Web browser which supports forms to use either. The engine at NCSA will use forms, but can run without it. If the engines here are busy, you can connect to each tool directly with the pointers on this page.

Search:

People Space (White Pages)

People Space: You know, like all the folks on the net. I've never used any of these (I have enough trouble keeping up with the people I already know), but grabbed the URLs from InterNIC for completeness

FTP Space (Archie)

For reasons I may never understand, Archie is nearly always very slow.
You were warned.

GopherSpace (Veronica)

Gopher is an very widely distributed Internet interface: it has been around for years, and can be accessed from a very simple terminal-based computer. Much like Mosiac, it allows a user to navigate the Internet without knowing how to use the underlieing tools. While Mosaic can use just about all network resources, gopher can only reach FTP sites, telnet connections, and other gophers. It remains, however, a highly useful space to search in, and is accessible to people with low-end connections and machines. GopherSpace is all things accesible through gopher, and Veronica searches over GopherSpace.

WAIS

Wide Areas Information Servers allow you to search a particular database of conceptually related material. Because the database is not browsible, however, I find them difficult use. It is also generally not clear the scope of each database, nor what types of things it is likely to contain.

WWW

Do to the youth of the World Wide Web, all of the engines which search over it are quite experimental. Some actually employ robots to run around the Web looking for things.
Last Changed: September 7, 1994
pesto@rpi.edu