Terminology - thanks

[Even Flood]

Folks,

Thank you for all the suggestions for the terminology. I notice
that I am not the only one confused!

A background - The seminar is for librarians in the north
Barentic region - the audience is Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish,
Russian - so naturally we have the seminar in English. :-)

I usually, especially to librarians, make a great point
of the difference between manually selected sites in
the directories and the robot generated engines. So
I need three different words for the one, the other and
the combination.

Several suggested an otherwise excellent dictionary at
http://www.cadenza.org/search_engine_terms/

Unfortunately the entry for Search Engine read:

>Search Engine 
 >    A server or a collection of servers dedicated to indexing internet
web pages,
 >storing the results and returning lists of pages which match particular
queries. The
>indexes arenormally generated using spiders. Some of the major search
engines are
>Altavista, Excite, Hotbot, Infoseek, Lycos, Northern Light and Webcrawler.
Note that
>Yahoo is a directory, not a search engine. The term Search Engine is also
often used to 
>describe both directories and search engines. 

and that was not much help ;-)

So based on several suggestions and some findings, I decided on
*Directory*
*Search engine* as described above ine the dictionary
*Search tool* for the combination.

That several search tools are both directories and search engines
(AltaVista is strong on both) is something I have to comment
strongly on in the seminar.


BTW - lately  I have been using the Open Directory Project
at http://dmoz.org more and more - it is most impressive.
And the AltaVista directory which is an amalgation of
LookSmart and ODP is also among my favourites.

Even


Even Flood,  Senior Research Librarian               
RBT/Norwegian DIANE Center, 
University Library of Trondheim, 
N 7491 Trondheim, Norway.
Phone: +47 73 59 51 62, Fax +47 73 59 60 97
http://www.ub.ntnu.no/diane/
"Come, and take choice of all my library, and so  beguile thy sorrow."
				(Shakespeare)