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Specialty Searches: Sites and Tools

Sometimes, to find valuable nuggets on the Net, you have to call in the specialists.

Most of what you want on the Net you can find with a general search engine. The rest of the time, though, you'll come up with nothing or with way too many results. Fortunately, you can use topic-specific search engines and tools to focus on a subset of the Web or to gain access to online data that's otherwise not available. Specialty search services index only Web pages that cover a specific topic, omitting material outside that scope.

People Finders

When it comes to finding a person, the Web is the place to be. Google displays phone numbers and addresses when you search for a combination of the person's name, zip or area code, city, and state. Lycos's Whowhere lets you look for a phone number, an e-mail address, or a Web reference, and sometimes it provides a street address in the bargain. The service's advanced phone-search page features handy links to dozens of international phone directories. The site 411 Locate looks for phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and street addresses, and it even offers reverse phone-number lookups.

Bigfoot lets you do still more with street addresses. Clicking the street name whisks you to a directory of nearby locations. And Switchboard provides a map of an address and a list of nearby restaurants and hotels.

Sights and Sounds

Text has its place, but the Web comes alive with images and music. These sites will help you find them.

Photo finders: AltaVista's image search site can find photographs of such obscure subjects as Japanese archery. Excite lets you search the online photo collections of other Excite members, as well as recent Associated Press and Reuters news photos. ImageFinder is the University of California at Berkeley's directory of ten image databases, including some at the Smithsonian Institution and NASA. If it's fine art, design, and architecture you're after, go to ADAM, a librarian-edited catalog of over 2500 online image databases. Want stock photos? Random Eye Technologies' Image Grabber lets you search online stock-photography sites, once you've completed registration.

Virtual video: Lycos's multimedia search page finds troves of photos, but it doesn't stop there. The site's VideoCenter page is a directory of streaming video clips created by other VideoCenter members. To search the Web for video clips, try AltaVista's Video Search page. StreamSearch also scours the Web for streaming audio and video clips that match search criteria.

Napster-less MP3 sources: If you're looking for MP3s, start with AltaVista's Audio Search engine, which now puts Napster to shame. Lycos Music combines music downloads with links to recording artists' Web sites. AudioGalaxy boasts lots of downloads, but you have to download a utility to get them from other AudioGalaxy users. Fast's multimedia search is another good source for MP3s.

'Our Top Story Tonight...'

Most general-purpose search engines spider the Web too infrequently to provide up-to-date news. Search sites specializing in news tend to be more current, but they may not cover many news sources or let you search far back for stories.

Lycos News serves up recent Reuters, AP, and Wired News stories. Don't bother looking for stories older than a week, however. Paradigm News Search from TotalNews lets you query the BBC News and Washingtonpost.com. Northern Light lets you search within one or more of a dozen categories, including business, sports, and weather. This feature is convenient if you want disparate pieces of information--such as the latest Colorado Rockies baseball score and the weather forecast for Vail, Colorado--in a single search. The site encompasses a greater range of newswires than does Lycos's service, but you won't find material older than two weeks.

Moreover offers a broad range of news sources but only covers stories a day or two old. For a less mainstream view of the news, browse News Is Free, an interesting and highly customizable directory to current stories on the Web from international, alternative, and mainstream sources.

If you want to read about older news, visit Excite's NewsTracker. And finally, if volume's what you're looking for, InfoJump claims to have an index of over 5 million articles from 4000 online publications.

Public-Sector Searching

No single entity cranks out more sheer verbiage than the U.S. government, so it's no surprise that numerous search engines are dedicated to keeping tabs on this online outpouring. FirstGov, from the General Services Administration, claims to search every word of every U.S. government document (30 million pages' worth), while also digging up lots of state and local government information. Usgovsearch lets you search the Web or its own collection of government-related publications. If you like, you can limit your searches to a particular agency or branch of government. FedWorld, a production of the U.S. Department of Commerce, offers a browsable list of federal government databases, including Supreme Court decisions, FAA regulations, and IRS forms. You can also search a huge number of government reports. Even Google gets involved in the action with a version of its service that searches U.S. government sites only.

Newsgroups and Forums

Some of the best information on the Web bubbles up in Usenet newsgroups. The premier site for newsgroup prospecting is Google Groups, formerly known as Deja.com. With an archive of thousands of newsgroup postings going back to 1995, there are few nuggets of wisdom you won't find there. For a list of online communities go to Forum One.

Kid-Safe Searches

To keep your children from stumbling across adult material while searching the Web, steer them to a search site designed with kids in mind. Yahooligans is a directory of child-safe Web sites selected by Yahoo editors. Ask Jeeves for Kids invites children to ask natural-language questions, such as Why is the sky blue? KidGrid is yet another directory designed especially for kids. KidsClick offers separate search fields for several authoritative online dictionaries and encyclopedias, as well as a host of other youth-oriented Internet resources.

Search for Search Engines

Still can't find what you're looking for? Try a search engine directory. Search Engine Guide is a service that allows you to search for search engines dedicated to particular topics. Argus Clearinghouse, Beaucoup, and Search Engine Watch offer directories of specialized search engines as well. SearchAbility is a huge directory of search engine directories. (It's only a matter of time before there's a directory of search engine directory directories.)

Some online information doesn't show up in any search engine. The information may be stored in a database, the site may require that you log in, or the site may simply block search engine indexing. Lycos's Searchable Databases directory puts many of these otherwise-off-limits resources at your disposal.

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