Excite

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Excite (http://www.excite.com) is another dual-purpose search site. It has both a search engine and a Web directory, like the other sites you've been reading about here, but with some nice additional features.

The Web directory at Excite is not as large as the ones at Infoseek or Yahoo!, but it does have one important extra: the sites listed in the Excite Web directory have been reviewed and rated by Excite personnel. When you use the Excite directory to learn about a site, you get more information than just a brief description�you actually get a reviewer's opinion of the site's overall quality and usefulness.

The search engine component at Excite is special too. Each site found in response to a keyword search has a link called [More Like This]. This allows you to show the search engine examples of the kind of sites you want to find, and narrow down your search more precisely in that way. For example, the second entry contains information about the breed standard for Shetland Sheepdogs. Suppose that's the type of information I'm looking for, as opposed to ads for specific breeders. If I click on the [More Like This] link next to that entry, the results page changes to show links similar to the chosen one.

Tip:	The Excite search engine also enables you to search the Excite Web directory itself. Just open the drop-down list on the Excite search page (it's set to World Wide Web by default) and change the setting to Excite Web Site Reviews.

Here's a summary of the search operators Excite uses:

• Use AND and OR as with other sites; AND forces both terms to appear (apples AND oranges), while OR finds pages where either term appears (apples OR oranges).
• To find pages where a word does not appear, use AND NOT. For instance, to find pages with tree but not bush, use tree AND NOT bush. You can also use a minus sign if you prefer, as in tree �bush.
• Use parentheses to group options in multiple-operator queries. For instance, to find pages that contain apple and either orange or grape, use apple AND (orange OR grape).