This document was written in 1994, when the World Wide
Web was emerging, but not yet the dominant usage of the
Internet. Other protocols and services were important and one had
to know how to search them. So, most entries in this page are only
of historic interest.
Yet Another Internet Index
- FTP
- There are Gigabytes of free software and information on
ftp-servers. The first tool to search them was
- Archie
- Archie started as a telnet service ( Rutgers.edu, mcgill.ca
). WWW-archie-gateways are a bit more comfortable:
An alternative to Archie was FTP Search,
now taken over by Lycos. Today, most WWW Search
Machines also index the content of ftp servers.
- GOPHER
- Significant information used to be provided by gopher
servers. (Gopher can be considered a predecessor to the WWW.)
Gopher space was searched with
Veronica. (Seems to be a dead link now.)
- TELNET
- In the early days of the Internet some services were available by
telnet. One of the best indexes of services available via ftp,
gopher, and especially telnet was Scott Yanoff's list. It seems to have been
last updated in 1995. Some copies (1, 2) are still
floating around on the Web. Scott Yanoff's list can be considered a precursor
to subject indexes like Yahoo.
HYTELNET was another index to
telnet services.
- USENET
News
- distributed conferencing
- DejaNews
- DejaNews (now at google) lets
you search all USENET articles (except alt.*, soc.*, talk.* or *.binaries ) (of
the last month) by keyword.
- RemarQ
- alternative to DejaNews
- FAQs
- A lot of information is in the frequently asked
questions (FAQ's) of USENET. They are posted to the news
group news.answers .
- The FAQ's are recorded at
- In case you are looking for a public news server,
you can contact www.muenz.com.
- Netfind, PH, WHOIS and other white page
services
- The
FAQ: How to find people's E-mail addresses is a good guide
to white page information services. Some links are:
Once upon a time, there were hand-made subject indexes like Scott
Yanoff's list . Bigger catalogues like CERN's WWW Virtual
Library followed. Hand-made indexes, however, are not easily
kept up-to-date. The first robots to automatically follow
hyperlinks and build URL databases appeared (WWW Worm / JumpStation / The WebCrawler/ WWW Nomad /
NorthStar.) Some of them caused distress among WWW-administrators
because of heavy load on WWW servers (cf. The
History of ALIWEB.) This motivated another apporach to let
content providers register their pages with more or less central
databases. (ALIWEB.)
In 1996, the big indexes (Altavista, Lycos) took over and some
smaller indexes disappeared (JumpStation).
In the period 1996-1998 there was still a significant
difference in the number of search results and their quality
between robot-made indexes and hand-made indexes. Searching
hand-made indexes like EInet
Galaxy or Yahoo gave mostly
high-quality links, but fewer. Searching the early indexes of Altavista or Lycos usually turned up more
results, but many with poor quality. When the Portal idea took
hold, most of the major players merged hand-made indexes with
robot-made indexes (as well as other content) and the distinction
between hand-made indexes and robot-made indexes blurred. The
following list was uptodate as of 1998:
- handmade, rated, or reviewed
- The WWW Virtual
Library
- Yahoo
- Open Directory
- EINet Galaxy
- Magellan
- Inter-Links
- The Clearinghouse
for Subject-Oriented Internet Resources
- ALIWEB
formerly Nexor, now EMnet
- Global Electronic
Library Library of Congress' subject index
- Internet-cmc
list John December
- A2Z
- mainly robot-made
- Lycos
- Alta Vista
- HotBot
- Excite
- WebCrawler
- Inktomi
- Infoseek
- OpenText
- NlightN
- regional
- DINO German
pages
- Yahoo.de
- web.de
- Lycos.de
- Fireball
(vormals flipper, TU Berlin)
- Kolibri
- Aladin
- Crawler
- Entry
- Hotlist
- Netguide
(Focus+Lycos)
- EuroFerret
- Search engine lists and multiple-engine
interfaces
- MetaCrawler
- W3 Search
Engines - an interface to several search engines (at U. of
Geneva)
- All in 1 Search
- MetaGer (Uni
Hannover)
- submit services
- Submit It!
As I won't update the list above, go to c't WWW
search links instead.
last reviewed: March 1, 2000
© 1994 - 2000 by Stefan
Jaschke
Disclaimer