Should you decide to venture beyond the reassuring walls of the Room here's a list of search engines along with a quick guide to their effectiveness.
	= Good for business sites = Good for UK sites	= Good for sports sites = Overall rating
	Altavista is one of the biggest and possibly the best search engine and is constantly being update by their web robot. You can do a simple or advanced search, both of which are very quick, and because they have such a massive database you'll probably get a lot of results back.
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	Excite is another of the big search engines with 5 million popular sites updated weekly. There's also a handy feature where you can search for web sites through a hierarchal system of categories. Results are displayed with a small summary of what's on the site.
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	Infoseek claims to have the Web's largest directory. This is very useful for locating pages under certain headings such as education, sport or business. Also has a street finding facility, but only for America, so don't use it for directions to your local sports centre or town hall.
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	This is an almost identical set-up to Infoseek with a very similar directory and a simple keyword search.
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	Although Webcrawler has a relatively small database what the database does contain is the major WWW sites and less useless information. This makes it a good one for those who are new to using search engines as there are fewer sites to sieve through.
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	Lycos has a simple keyword search which can be customized. One feature is that results can be shown that are either a loose match, a good match or a strong match.
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	Hotbot provides a very thorough, customizable key word or phrase search. This search engine is very user friendly and also has a massive database like Altavista.
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	Apollo claims to have a strong UK bias. Unfortunately this isn't true and if you type in "football" as a keyword expect pages of URLs for the Miami Dolphins and the Montana Beavers but nothing for your beloved local footie team. Even so, it's not such a bad search engine.
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	Lifestyle doesn't have a keyword search which makes it hard to find locate small groups of specialist URLs. The results are displayed in long alphabetical lists with short, often misleading, descriptions.
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	UK Directory has a nifty little keyword facility as well as the directory. Results from the directory are displayed in handy alphabetical lists under their relevant category.
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	UK Index has a keyword search that works in conjunction with its directory to give a very effective search of its extensive UK database. Searches can be based on just one of their directory categories giving a very large selection of URLs.
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	Yell is very thorough and very easy to use effectively. It has both a keyword search and a directory with many categories that help it live up to its name as the internet's Yellow Pages.
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	Bizweb is great for finding out commercial information on just about anything. It combines a keyword search with a directory that makes it easy to track down relevant sites.
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	UK Plus makes searching easy. The directory is just right with a good number of headings and a grand selection of sight listings. What's more, the keyword search doesn't churn up a load of rubbish. Instead there is normally a decent selection of sites.
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	UK Pages isn't much use unless you're looking for companies that specialize in pipelines. However, if you are it's great.
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	Eurobase might be a great search engine. Sadly it doesn't work so who know's?
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	UK Cybersearch only has a keyword search and it doesn't draw from a very big database. But it's simple and might turn out some useful stuff.
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	Bizwiz is a part of Access Business Online which is the place to go if you're looking for business sites. It has a massive database and a variety of ways of locating URLs. The site also contains news, classifieds and much much more.
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	Infohiway has a huge database but also has a huge amount of rubbish. A typical keyword search gives an endless list in which there must be useful stuff but I'll be darned if I can find it.
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	The Lexiconn directory has a handy feature where you can select what region your selected URLs come from. Using this with the categories lets you select precisely what you want.
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	Britnet isn't really a search engine; it just has a list of commercial British sites. Although it isn't very big what it does have is detailed and easy to access.
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