• AltaVista Health

(http://www.altavista.com)
AltaVista search engine ranks sites by relevancy and permits advanced/refined searching. Main site has 275 million indexed Web pages, purportedly the largest searchable index available. Allows searching of Web sites, discussion groups and news. Search on "health policy" produces ~50,000 links.


• America Online: Webcenters| Health (http://www.aol.com/webcenters/health/home.adp)
  Health WebCenter includes 8 "departments" with subtopics under each containing almost exclusively consumer-oriented links (women's health, men's health, children's health, etc.). AOL.com search engine (http://www.aol.com/) ranks sites by relevancy. Search on "health policy" produces >2.5 million links.
  
  
• AOL Search (http://search.aol.com/)
  Uses same extensive index structure as DMOZ Open Directory. Search on "health policy" produces 9,856 results.
  
  
• DirectHit (http://www.directhit.com)
  Rank orders search results based on Web pages that people most often use and based on length of time spent.
  
  
• DMOZ Open Directory Project (http//www.dmoz.org/)
  Similar to Yahoo in that it uses a detailed index structure of knowledge categories and rather than using professional editors, it uses ~20,000 volunteer editors to find and catalog sites; has compiled 1.2 million sites. Search on "health policy" produced 520 hits.
  
  
• Excite Health (http://www.excite.com/health/)
  Includes 17 major topics with subtopics under each containing almost exclusively consumer-oriented links, with editor's most highly rated sites appearing first. Excite search engine (http://www.excite.com) provides a brief Web site guide to an existing table of contents of related topics and ranks sites by relevancy score. Search on "health policy" produces >2.5 million links.
  
  
• Fast Search (http://www.alltheweb.com)
  One of largest search engines, searching more than 200 million URLs. Search on "health policy" produced 82,700,000 links.
  
  
• InteliHealth (http://www.intelihealth.com/IH)
  Links predominantly consumer-oriented sites, selected quality web sites reviewed by an editor and medical journal databases.
  


• Infoseek: Health (http://www.infoseek.go.com/Center/Health)
  Includes 23 major health topics with subtopics containing mostly consumer-oriented links. Three-star rating system used to rank-order sites. Infoseek search engine (http://www.infoseek.com/) allows for search filtering to particular countries, etc. Search on "health policy" produces >1,180,000 editor-ranked links.
  
  
• LookSmart (http://www.looksmart.com/eus1/)
  Includes roughly 20 quick health reference topics with consumer-oriented links, but includes links to major health issues such as euthanasia, health costs/reform, patient rights etc. LookSmart search engine (http://www.looksmart.com/) pre-categorizes sites into 24,000 categories. Shortly will include an option to rank sites by frequency of hits using Direct Hit method. Search on "health policy" produces 1041 links.
  
  
• Lycos Health Guide (http://www.lycos.com/health/)
  Includes roughly 20 quick health reference topics with consumer-oriented links. Lycos search engine (http://www.lycos.com/) allows for detailed filtering and can list for a given topic the Top 5% of sites (by volume of traffic) or standard rank-ordered list of links. Shortly will include an option to rank sites by frequency of hits using Direct Hit method. For each link, user can find Similar Links or More Pages from Same Site. Search on "health policy" produces ~200 links, but exact number not reported.
  
  
• Overture

Designed mostly as a consumer-oriented site for those seeking product information. Search on "health policy" produced >700 links.


• SNAP: Health (http://home.snap.com/. Click on Health)
  Health directory includes ~20 major topics with subtopics containing predominantly consumer-oriented link. SNAP search engine (http://home.snap.com/) allows for search filtering and ranks sites by relevancy score. Search on "health policy" produces ~350,000 links.
  
  
• Thunderstone (http://www.thunderstone.com/)
  General search engine that ranks sites by relevancy score. Search on "health policy" produces ~100 links.



• Web Crawler Health (http://www.webcrawler.com/health/)
  Includes 12 major health topics with subtopics containing mostly consumer-oriented links plus Top Sites. Webcrawler search engine (http://www.webcrawler.com/) rank orders links by relevance. Search on "health policy" produces 117 links.



• WebMD (http://www.webmd.com)
  With more than 20 million visitors each month, WebMD Health is the leading consumer-focused healthcare information website. Search on "health policy" produces 1230 links.
  


• Yahoo! Health (http://www.yahoo.com/health/)
  Organized as a large table of contents to editor-reviewed links, searches produce structured list of links. Contains over 50 preselected health topics such as environmental health, health administration, long term care, public health and safety and workplace health, with subtopics within each. Yahoo! search engine (http://www.yahoo.com/) organizes links according to a topical outline. Search on "health policy" produces 1,130,000 links.

Metasearch Engines

These search engines automatically search a number of search engines and then compile results into an unduplicated list.

Specialized Web Search

• Ask Jeeves! (http://www.askjeeves.com/)
  Specialized search engine that allows natural language queries. Searches produce list of links as well as links found by AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, WebCrawler and Yahoo. Search for "health public policy" produced matches.
  
  
• Deja.com (http://www.deja.com/home_ps.shtml)
  Search engine for Discussions searches ~60,000 forums (newsgroups) and provides a list of top newsgroups related to that topic (user can then browse these newsgroups) as well as links to specific messages within newsgroups that relate to the topic. Search on "health policy" produces 19,600 hits.
  
  
• Google (http://www.google.com/)
  General search engine that ranks popularity of sites using a formula that takes into account how many Web pages are linked to a given site in a list of search results. Search on "health policy" produces ~2,000,000 links.



• HotBot (http://www.hotbot.com)
  HotBot search engine allows for excellent filtering to particular dates, languages, domain types, etc. and rank orders list by relevance. Includes an option to rank sites by frequency of hits using Direct Hit method. Search on "health policy" produced >18,000,000 links.

• The Mining Co. Health/Fitness (http://www.miningco.com/)
  Specialized search engine that relies on experts as "guides" to create a knowledge outline of a particular topic and set of reliable Web links to each level within the outline. Health/Fitness area contains 9 major topics. With general search engine (http://www.miningco.com/) users can search thousands of pre-selected topics or enter search term. Search on "health policy" produces 321 unduplicated links.
  

• Northern Light (http://northernlight.com/)
  Highly praised specialized search engine that uses a database of 5,000 full-text magazines/newspapers and 120 million Web pages. All searches produce sites with information verified by an editor, as well as the standard list of unverified links to other sites. Searches are categorized into folders that combine articles and sites by source and topic. Search on "health policy" produces >1.2 million links sorted into 13 folders.