The comments in bold are taken from the Netscape Net-Search page, and any comments below that are those of myself or my brother Matt, who tends to be better spoken than I am. Please mail me any search engines I may have left off.

This comprehensive catalog of the Internet finds what you need in seconds, including text, graphics, sounds, and videos. PC World magazine recently rated Lycos best of the top 11 Internet search engines in both quality of information and relevancy of results.

I love Lycos. It's at the top of this list because it's the only search engine I ever use on any kind of regular basis. Shop around, you'll like Lycos even more for it.

Offering compact or detailed searches through what the company claims is the largest Web index, Digital Equipment Corporation's Alta Vista can help you find your way through 8 billion words filling 16 million Web pages. It also provides a full-text index of more than 13,000 newsgroups.

This should be better than Lycos, but I just can't take a shine to it, for some reason. It's second on this list because I find it very handy for looking up UseNet articles that have expired of my server. Seems to duplicate sites more than other utilities.

Arguably the pioneer Internet guide, Yahoo has been accepting submissions since what seems like the beginning of it all. There's an editorial filter at work here - not every college student's home page makes it into the directory - but Yahoo's veteran status has allowed it to build a comprehensive cross-discipline resource base.

Editorial filter, huh? I guess this college student's homepage isn't gonna get listed, then. If you're just randomly surfing the browse by subject feature is nice.

I think it's interesting that Netscape mentions every search engine and it's dog, but it doesn't say anything about webcrawler. This engine has been around for a while, but it's sort of the vanilla pudding of the search engines.

Matt -- "A very fast web searcher maintained by America On-Line. It returns the URLs very quickly then you get to wait 5 minutes while it downloads an advertisement. Typical."

The Open Text Index searches every word of every Web page the company has indexed - some 21 billion words and phrases in all. The company claims it's one of the largest indexes available. Pose queries of virtually any length, or focus in by searching only titles or links.

Matt -- "This searcher doesn't seem to be quite as fast as WebCrawler, but it does seem a bit more comprehensive. Has the added advantage of returning the context of any hits."

This searchable directory provides reviews of popular Internet resources - Web sites, Usenet newsgroups, and FTP and Gopher sites - cross-referenced across multiple topics. Once you've found a relevant site, the "Find Similar" function searches for more of the same. The guide performs precise searches for specific phrases and proper names, and searches are sensitive to case, numbers, and special characters (for example, AT&T or 49ers).

I don't use this engine much, but it's interesting to note that Netscape's integral search box on the "Net Search" page is a submission form to infoseek. hhmmmm...

Excite tracks down information by searching for concepts, not just keywords. Updated weekly, Excite's database contains what the company claims are more than 1.5 million Web pages, 50,000-plus Web page reviews written by journalists, the latest two weeks of Usenet news, and classifieds. Excite also includes City.Net, news from Reuters, and an interactive cartoon.

Interesting utility. Options for searching for unsorted web pages, reviewed web pages, usenet, and "Classified advertisements," whatever the hell that is. Check out their homepage sometime, too. They have one of the nicest looking pages I've seen in a long time.

Explore Magellan, McKinley's Internet Guide. Magellan provides reviews and ratings for a vast collection of Web, FTP, and Gopher sites, and Usenet newsgroups. Users can browse Magellan topics or search specific keywords or phrases. Magellan's green-light feature indicates content that is deemed appropriate for general viewing.

Matt -- A lesser known search engine that also includes tightly integrated reviews for some sites. Also allows you to exclude 'non-family-oriented' sites from search results.

I haven't used this engine much, but I am endeared to it anyway. It was implemented by a professor and a graduate student at UC Berkley as part of some larger project. I highly recomend clicking on the above graphic to learn more about it.