SEARCHING THE WORLD-WIDE-WEB - AN EVALUATION OF AVAILABLE TOOLS AND METHODOLOGIES

Search Engines and Classified Directories have become essential tools for locating information on the World Wide Web. A consequence of incre asing demand, as the volume of information on the Web has expanded, ha s been a vast growth in the number of tools available. Each one claims to be more comprehensive, more accurate and more intuitive to use tha n the last. This paper attempts to organise the available tools into a number of categories, according to their information acquisition and retrieval methods, with the intention of exposing the strengths and we aknesses of the various approaches. The importance and implications of Information Retrieval (IR) techniques are discussed. Description of t he evolution of automated tools enables an insight into the aims of re cent and future implementations (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.