Newsgroups and Mailing Lists

The World Wide Web is like a ocean of knowledge where search engines are like your navigational aid. Without good understanding of search engines, you act like a direction-less ship in the ocean - wandering from site to site without getting anywhere near what you set out to find.

The Web has great sources of information for your business - you can find data about your market, your competitors and your customers. The challenge is knowing where and how to look for it.

The first step to mastering online research is to understand how to take full advantage of Web search tools. Many people find these tools frustrating, because they either don’t land pertinent sites, or they give so many hits that the results are unmanageable. This can be remedied if you first learn how these engines work, and how you can use their powerful search features to zero in on the information you need.

Everyone has a different favorite search site, and you will probably find that you use one or two more than the rest. Still, it pays to be familiar with all of them. Though there are thousands of search engines, you need to know about top 10 of them. We have compiled a list of top 50 search engines in this section. These are great for general information search. However, if you are looking for very specific information on particular country - try country-specific search engines. The Market Information Finder at Banijya page provides information on country-specific search engines.

Web search sites fall into two basic types --- directories and search engines

These organize Web sites by subject. Users can choose a subject of interest and then browse the list of resources in the category, narrowing their search by the descriptors or subcategories provided by the directory. Directories are very good for finding general information, since you can look at organized lists of sites in the same category. Yahoo! is a prime example of a search directory. Other sites have directory features, like Excite’s Channels or Infoseek’s topics.

These are very large databases of information related to Web sites that allow you to search for pages that contain keywords you designate. The leading search engines attempt to catalog every page on the Web using spiders or bots which go out onto the Web and bring back information about the various pages. Due to their vast size, search engines are not useful for general queries, which can result in thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of hits. However, most contain sophisticated search tools, which, if handled properly, can let you find specific information quickly and easily. Examples of search engines include AltaVista, Excite, Hotbot, Infoseek and Lycos.