The Moreover search engine indexes current news headlines from 1,800 sources. My search for "artificial intelligence" pulled up about a dozen headlines for the week. You can sign up for email delivery of headline links about robotics or many other standard topics. . [29Jan01.]

UWest Florida's Institute for Human and Machine Cognition has created a pageless Web browser based on concept mapping, free for educational uses. You can easily create concept maps, alter the information, and add links to other resources. New maps are opened by clicking on concept box icons. . [Miami Herald, 31Dec00. Edupage.]

Webbrain uses an interesting (but slow) graphical display of the Open Directory Project Database to help you refine your search. . [29Jan01.]

There are many text databases than can be accessed via the Web but that can't be indexed by spiders. (An example is the Money Tree Survey of US venture capital, .) Search for these entry points via Gary Price's Direct Search page, ; Intelliseek's Invisibleweb.com directory, ; AlphaSearch, ; The Big Hub, ; Infomine Multiple Database Search, ; or WebData.com, . [Chris Sherman, net-hap, 08Jun00.]

BrightPlanet.com is one of the companies that makes specialized search engines for other companies, with "deep" access to online databases. Their LexiBot interface for Windows is $90, with a free 30-day trial. . [NY Times, 25Jan01. Edupage.]

The following are from Gleason Sackmann's Net-Happenings newsletters for early 2000:

The FAST "All the Web" search engine claims to index 575M URLs, and to have the most extensive multimedia (image, video, audio) search coverage. .

Topclick is a privacy-sensitive interface to the Google search engine, with no cookies, no banner ads, no profiling, and no disclosure. .

The Open Directory Project uses an army of volunteer editors to produce a directory of the web. .

The SimpliFind search engine combines keywords with topic selection (which it suggests, so you can clarify your intent). Registered users can save queries for repeated use. . (You don't hear much about expert systems anymore, but I would call this an expert system interface.)

Speechbot is an experimental search engine for audio (and video) content broadcast from certain other websites, based on automatically generated transcripts. .

To search fine art by category, see .

There's even a search engine for Adobe PDF files on the Web. View summaries of the documents before deciding whether to download them. .

Career and resume' searches are the specialty of .

Sourcebank is a search engine for programming resources on the Internet, including articles, research papers, and source code. .

SearchEdu indexes university and academic web sites. .

EgoSurf is specialized for finding your name on the Web, or the name of any person, organization, or product. .

You can search a dozen People search engines at the same time via . For keyword searches, over 300 engines are accessed in parallel.

Fossick is a collection of over 3K specialist search engines and topical guides. .

Hotrate updates its relevance rankings by analyzing what people have been searching for. .

The Informant service will notify you when your specified search results change. .

Search Engine Watch is a news and tutorial site about search engines. .

Search engines from 162 specific countries are listed at . Another list of country-specific engines is .

Noodle Tools can help you find a starting point for your online research. There's also NoodleBib interactive bibliography composer that automates the creation of properly formatted references. .

sWhois (smart whois) simplifies searching the world's Internet domains. .

Reverse telephone information can be searched at . One of the many forward phone directories is .

Pico Search lets you set up a free search engine for your website's content. .

Almost 80K links to resource pages are categorized at . Students may be happier with the scholarly categories and 141K links at StudyWeb, . Over 2K scholarly societies and resource centers in 30 fields are listed at . Then there's SciCentral, at , with over 50K links in 120 science and engineering specialties.

DejaNews provides a Web-based interface to Usenet discussion groups, at . You can search for groups by topic or for discussions by text phrases, at . Other discussion groups and online newsletters can be found via Liszt, ; L-Soft, ; New Lists, ; Internet Scout New Lists, ; Yahoo! Groups, ; Topica, ; Neosoft, ; Mailbase, ; Catalog.com, ; and Findmail, . [David P. Dillard , net-hap, 31Jan00.]

If nothing else works, try asking an expert at .

----- "To chop a tree quickly, spend twice the time sharpening the ax." -- Chinese proverb. -----