SearchPlex

Credits & other info: How to Use | Acknowledgements | Other multiplex sites

Alta Vista - The NFL linebacker of search engines: Big. Fast. Dumb.

HotBot - Aren't those Wired folk clever? First fluorescent green type, now this.

InfoSeek - Excellent computer-generated Web index. Fast, comprehensive, good relevance ranking.

Lycos - Enough already with the excellent indexes!

Open Text - This excellent site describes itself as "the fastest search engine on the Internet, and the only one to index every word of every page."

WebCrawler - Yet another excellent index.

CNN Interactive - So, who needs TV?

Yahoo's weather page.

DejaNews - Searchable Usenet archive. Way nifty.

Ohio State's Usenet FAQ archive - Check here before posting your silly question.

The awe-inspiring Internet movie database.

Yahoo - Very nice human-generated Web directory. Good for finding big, relatively well-known sites.

Harold Sasaki's whois domain lookup.

Harold Sasaki's finger form.

Ed Kubaitis' weblint gateway at UIUC catches your web-page boo-boos.

How to use the SearchPlex

The forms collected here are gateways to resources located elsewhere in the net. Within each section, fill in a field and select the associated link; your response will appear in a few seconds. For more options, or to learn more about a resource, go to the resource itself by selecting its name in the section title.

If you find the SearchPlex useful, you might want to copy it to your own hard drive for more convenient access. I've provided detailed instructions on copying the SearchPlex to a local file for users of the Windows version of Netscape.

Acknowledgements

This page is a derivative work in a number of ways:

I didn't create the excellent resources to which this page points, and from which it derives its value. The people who did have my sincerest thanks.
Much of this page is copied directly from the web pages of the remote resources. I hope the authors of those documents don't mind.
The concept of a multiplex search form is nothing new. The first one I ever saw was CUI's W3 Search Engines page. That page acknowledges NCSA's Experimental Search Engine Meta-Index as its inspiration, and that page in turn credits Tony Sanders for the idea and initial version. Quite a lineage.
I wasn't even the original author of this particular multiplex form. My net-buddy Mark Thompson wrote a lot of it, in those happy days before a $3,000 phone bill knocked him off the net, seemingly forever. Sigh.

Some other interesting implementations of this concept are:

Scott Bannister's Metasearch
c|net's search.com
Daniel Dreilinger's SavvySearch.
William Cross's All-in-1 Search Page.

Last update February 3, 1998
John Callender jbc@west.net
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