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All the major search engines now index well over a billion pages of information. The problem generally isn't lack of data but finding that one tiny needle in a virtual haystack of almost limitless size (much like looking for a needle in a stack of needles).

Any serious researcher needs to know more about search engines than the average person using the Net for fun or even for very specialized searches associated with a hobby or perhaps a certain topic, e.g.,. cancer research. How do you learn the ins and outs of search?

The Past, Present, and Future of Search

Remember Northern Light? How about Excite, Galaxy, Lycos, HotBot, Magellan, InfoSpace, Go, Webcrawler, iWon, Netfind, or Webtop? If so, you've been searching the Internet a long time because many of these search engines are long gone and forgotten. However many changes in search and search engines have taken place in recent years, nothing has been quite so dramatic as what has occurred in the past two years with the appearance of the new Yahoo and Live Search engines.

While many smaller, focused search tools still exist, the sad fact is that, in terms of large, powerful, world-encompassing search engines, Internet searchers at this moment have fewer major search engines from which to choose. What happened to get us to this point and what does the future portend? 12