When it comes to searching the Web, there are plenty of online services to choose from - HotBot, Excite, Infoseek, Yahoo, and AltaVista, to name a few. Each offers its own pros and cons, and each requires subtly different searching techniques to really find what you seek. Directories, like Yahoo or Excite, are expansive catalogs of Web sites that have been intuitively divided into categories.

Think department store - say it's a spatula you seek. You start by escalating to housewares, then locate the kitchen section, zero in on utensils, then of the three choices of spatulas, you select the Goldilocks-perfect pancake flipper. Search engines, like HotBot or AltaVista, look for any sites containing the keyword you seek. Even when you narrow the field (with advanced search options), search engines often produce an overwhelming number of incongruous, puzzling, or just plain weird sites. But, since they don't have to manually categorize each site, search engines tend to cover much more of the Web than do catalogs.