Web Search
Combine a powerful search engine with a tireless Web spider, and you're breezing through millions of pages. The better the engine, the more relevant your results. Examples: AltaVista, Excite, Lycos.

Meta Search
You can send your query to all the big Web search engines with one command, and get a single set of results. Examples: MetaCrawler, SuperSeek, Mamma.

Usenet Search
You can search through messages posted in the Usenet Newsgroups, without needing access to a dedicated news server. Examples: Deja News, Reference.Com, InfoSeek.

WAIS
Wide Area Information Servers system predates the Web, and has become largely outmoded by it.

White Pages
Look up e-mail addresses, telephone numbers and more information about people on the Internet. Examples: BigFoot, Four11, WhoWhere.

New Internet Search Ideas

AltaVista Live Topics
When your search generates a large number of hits, the Live Topics option automatically appears, offering a graphical interface to help navigate the results.

AT1: The Invisible Web
As more Web sites become database-driven, search engines have a harder time indexing them. AT1 is able to search "the invisible Web" for this hidden data because it hooks directly into databases.

SemioMap Discovery Search
The SemioMap search engine generates a graphical map of the relationships between documents. This is called a "discovery search" and helps you wade through huge numbers of documents. (Review)

Specialty / Topic Search Sites
If you're searching for Web documents in a specific language, from a certain geographic area, or of interest to a unique demographic group, you may want to check out one of the numerous specialty search sites. Yahoo has a great list.