Thank you to First Service Bank for sponsoring our County's Community Website.

There are literally hundreds of search engines that let you gather information on the Internet. Most of these search engines fall into three categories.

Keyword Indexes, produce an index of all the text on the sites they examine. This type of search engine normally does no content analysis, but use word placement and frequency to determine how a page ranks among other pages containing the same or similar words. Keyword searches are fast and broad and if you are not careful about the construction of your request you're likely to get a huge amount of data to sift through.

Subject Directories, are the card catalogues of the Web. They assign sites to specific topic categories based on the site's content. These search engines are pre grouped and are easier to browse than those in a raw keyword search.

Metasearch Engines, allow you to search a number of data bases and engines simultaneously. A metasearch's major strengths are convenience and breadth. The disadvantage is that they often use the lowest common search denominators. This is done to allow them to work with the widest possible number of search engines.

It is suggested to use at least three search engines. Often using a combination of keyword and subject based sites will provide the most useful information. There are millions of sites on the web today and the number is growing daily. It is hard to imagine that there is a topic that is not covered to some degree on the Internet. Feel free to select from the search engines below. They have been specially selected as the best available.