Colleen Meade  -  Favorite
Internet Computer Tools
 
While using the Internet, I have evaluated a number of websites of 'Computer Tools'. The ones that have become my favorites (and that I recommend to others) are:

Click on one of the names above to go to a section below containing a brief description of that site (and why I recommend it) as well as a link to the actual site itself (and, in some cases, alternate sites also).
 
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Favorite (General Purpose) Search Engines:

Google

There are three main reasons why I like this search engine:
  • Results.  Even without the 'phrase' capability of Metacrawler (see below), it finds what I want every time, and almost always it is on the first page.
     
  • Speed.  They're back with a zillion pages before you can blink!
     
  • Virtually no advertisements!  There are NONE on their home page and just a small 'sponsored site' one at the top of each page of websites returned.  I don't quite know how they support themselves, but that's not my problem :)
     

Metacrawler

There are two reasons why I like this search engine:
  • The reason it is called METAcrawler is that it goes out and runs searches with a number of other search engines, then combines the results.  It uses most of the more popular ones:  Google, AltaVista, Direct Hit, etc.  What one might not find, another will.
  • Metacrawler returns a maximum of 10 hits from each of the search engines that it uses.  Not only does this make it very fast, but (particularly after you combine the sites that are found by more than one engine) you end up with a maximum of 50 or 60 hits, though the average is somewhat less (usually around 20 to 30).  You might think this would mean you would miss something, but in hundreds of searchs, I've found what I needed about 99% of the time.

A second search engine that operates on the same idea, i.e. doing a 'meta' search using other search engines, is this related site:

* mamma.com (Their motto is "The mother of all search engines")

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Favorite MIDI (Music Files) Search Engine:

Musicrobot

This seems to be a very efficient 'search engine' for finding MIDI files.  The only disadvantage is that it can return dozens of sites that you then have to search through (and some of them are not of particularly high quality).  However, the up side to that is that while you are looking through them for the song you have requested, you often come on a number of other ones that you like that you hadn't even been looking for!

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Favorite 'Pictures/Images' Search Engine:

Google

I like using Google to find images for basically the same three reasons I like it as a basic search engine:  results, speed and the lack of advertising.  It does sometimes return some rather odd entries - you'd wonder why the heck they got picked as they have no relation to what you are looking for whatsoever, but that is a minor annoyance.  A bigger problem is that a lot of the images are no longer resident on the site where Google first found them, but at least if they aren't, you can still use your right mouse button to save Google's thumbnail.
 

Ditto

Ditto

This is a really neat way to find pictures of a certain subject on the web.  Rather than using your search engine to look for a person or thing, where the site(s) may not even have a picture, you enter the name into this one and it returns sites that have .jpg or .gif images of the subject in question.  It even shows you a small 'thumbnail' of the image.  Then, if that looks like what you want, you can go to the site and get it (using the good old 'right-mouse-button trick').

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Favorite 'People/Businesses' Search Engine:

Canada 411

This is a good site for finding people or businesses in Canada.  The only problem with it seems to be that it will disappear on occasion.  By 'disappear', I mean that your browser will come back with a 'Page not Found' error, not just that their server is down (or unavailable).  Don't know why this happens, but it's always come back (so far, anyway - knock on wood!), so if it does, you'll just have to try again later.

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This page last updated on:  May 19th, 2002

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