www.notess.com: Greg Notess writes for Online and Database about searching on the Web. The site includes features of major web engines and search tools, news of the engines and their capabilities, reviews of meta-engines, and a bibliography of readings.

SearchEngineWatch is also excellent for features and capabilities, and news. It's particularly targeted at web site developers interested in having their pages positioned better in the engines, and explains both policy and technical issues regarding how the various engines place a page in the retrieval display. Is the "membership fee" worth it? Yes, it's very informative and useful. His Power Searching Tutorial is very useful.

e-blast, a directory from Encyclopedia Britannica has extensive reviews by human editors.

Snap!, a partner of NBC, shows the differences between the scholarly and commercial approaches, in that the .com sites seem to get preference.

Essential Links is an interesting "portal" of significant sites.

YaHooligans and Searchopolis are always popular.

Great Sites!, from the American Library Association and volunteers contains resources for kids and parents: a collection of 700+ web resources, on arts and entertainment, history, literature, science and technology (and a little fun).

Internet Kids and Family Yellow Pages, from Net Guru Jean Armour Polly, provides a sampling from her book for kids and parents -- 100 sites in ten categories such as science, math, games, homework help, pen pals, reading and the like. Annotations are extensive and enthusiastic.

KidsClick! a yahoo-type directory of resources by librarians, with annotations, reading level, and presence of illustrations.

The Awesome Library for Teachers, Students, and Parents covers 14,000 resources. It offers different interfaces for kids, teachers, teens, and parents. The kids (and teens) interface has assembled 70 different "ask an expert" sites - from bugs to plumbers to magicians - and regular tutors.

The KIDS (Kids Identifying and Discovering Sites) Project is a part of the Scout Report. In the KIDS project, K-12 students review sites that are of interest to them, for other K-12 sites. Each bi-weekly newsletter focuses on a specific topic.

Kids Web, from the Northeast Parallel Architectures Center at Syracuse University, is a directory of resources for K-12. Annotations are brief, but the subjects include the sciences, arts, social studies. Sports, Games, and reference materials are in the "miscellaneous" section.

TLA School Resources. The State of Tennessee offers its Kid's Pages, which include quizzes on state government, advice on how to be a healthy and safe kid, and a money game.

Smart Zone from Edview is a catalog of "teacher-approved" resources, and their "channel lock," a piece of software that works with a browser to prevent the browser from looking at any resources outside of the Zone. Searches can be targeted for elementary, middle, or high school. The Saturn search turned up 11 astronomy sites for the elementary set, 2 games, and 1 cars.

Study Web is another directory from American Computer Resources. Launched in October of 1997, it covers 88,000 "research quality" sites, selected by its "faculty" - which appear to be volunteer contributors. It appears that a few people contribute to a given area, functioning like editors for an area. Entries have summaries, indication of visual content, grade level appropriateness. Coverage is not comparable in breadth to Yahoo: Nanotechnology has 32 entries to Yahoo's 75: but you can figure out what you want to look at more easily here.

Dig from Disney is more of a portal, with a searchable directory of resources, a database of activities by age and purpose (indoor, outdoor etc.). Weekly guided tours are offered every Wednesday at 4:00 - with Earl and a relevant expert.

Enchanted Learning is a purveyor of fine CD-ROM products, but also offers a collection of content resources. They offer a directory of kid-related resources, and some extensive content on dinosaurs, sharks and the like.

The Natural History Museums and Collections is an extensive collection of resources - sadly, many of the links are broken - but as an international collection, it's worth taking a look.

A few groaners... All the tools for kids aren't that great, and often lack the assurance you'd want with kid's tools. Who knows who put together Kid Sites? What perspective it's putting forward? Confusing system of ratings - you can rate the sites, but not see them. The selections are a bit odd. One NASA site for Saturn? There are no dates for the pages. There's nothing on Saturn, rex or eggs at DinoSearch - it claims to be created "by kids for kids" but there's no information on whose kids, and no information about scope, perspective, dates, or authority. Imagine putting the women's sites and kid's sites in one section called "Potpourri" - visit Beaucoup to see it so. Nice layout, but the content leaves something to be desired. If they'd explain the emphasis, maybe that would help.

Super Snooper includes only sites which "do not contain information of a pornographic, violent or hatred-related nature." Cool Sites Network believes in the ability for people to access any types of sites they wish: but, also believes that other sites provide this access. They have cataloged (as of an unspecified date) 1.5 million sites, primarily from the English-speaking world. The saturn search turned up 100 entries, not a single one from NASA> It appears to be searching the URL's first - about 90% had saturn there. Almost all were Saturn dealerships, with a few game sites.

SmartBrowsing in Netscape has raised some privacy concerns. Privacy Forum, 11 August 1998, provides a discussion of Netscape's "What's Related" feature. The Alexa technology is described at the Alexa site.

ISleuth offers "windows" into the major engines as a search aid, as well as directory capabilities.

Meta-interface Proteus offers a search query aid, easy access to major engine help files, and new interface.

One of the most exciting new tools for information professionals is the KnowledgeCite Library. It is a "database of databases" from SilverPlatter providing access (in beta) to 17 bibliographic files (GeoRef, Agricola, ERIC, and four HW Wilson databases). It's in beta now, and scheduled for release in August of this year. It's exciting because of its explicit explanations of relevance, and its full implementation of thesaurii - as well as its close coupling with the local catalog.

Ranking mechanisms are changing: See Hotbot for its relationship with DirectHit: a compilation of sites that others doing the same search found useful, or at least visited. Google is tracking other sites that link to a given page as a measure of utility. GlobalBrain attempts to go beyond human directories and tap into the preferences of users themselves by tracking popular sites and integrating the results into the retrieval algorithms.

GoTo is simply selling site positions, first shown to the highest bidder, as Alta Vista also is now doing.

Multi-media engines include Alta Vista's Photo Finder, and Scour.net. The first is very concerned about copyright issues, the second doesn't seem to be.

Research projects are focusing in part on clustering. The IBM Clever project is trying to develop an "Automated Resource Compilation," understanding both bibliographies and sites of significant content. GROUPER and HuskySearch work together to cluster results of a search by examining words in common in retrieved pages. Informedia Mediator is from a Swiss Bank, and offers interesting options in customization.

New interfaces are presented at SavvySearch (with a new mission) and Proteus.

For children, Ask Jeeves for Kids includes resources from other engines and directories, but filters them with SurfWatch. The "Where is Saturn" search yielded planetary information from their database, but cars from the external links!

Conversational interfaces ala Star Trek are on the horizon, and making strides from ELIZA. The Brain is not quite the Enterprise computer, but it's an interesting step forward.

Asking people questions: on biology at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute AskAScientist program; on California natural history or Native American culture at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History; on weeds and pests at the Purdue University Plant and Pest Diagnostic Laboratory; on population genetics from Professor Michael Wooten at Auburn University (but this site is primarily for K-12 students); on whales at WhaleNet; on roses at the American Rose Society.