Emily's places to begin exploring the Net

Exploring the net

This page is, for the most part, a list of links to pages that contain lots of links. If you're looking for something specific, or just want to wander around, start here.

Catalogs

Probably the best place to start poking around is the Yahoo Home Page, which contains thousands of links to just about every type of page you can think of.
CERN, the home of the Web, maintains a page called the WWW Virtual Library, with links to just about every subject you can think of.
Magellan is a directory of Web sites, with ratings and reviews of each site. They give my whole Web site three out of four stars. Rah.

Search engines

The Web has changed a lot since I put this page up in late 1994. I used to link stuff like Alta Vista and Lycos and WebCrawler and HotBot here, but I'm not doing that anymore. Most of the search engines have turned themselves into "portals," with Yahoo-style directories and news tickers and animated graphics and people finders and ads for free email addresses and and and... and they all look more or less alike. Feh. When I go to a search engine page, I want a good search engine. That's all.

So: the biggest advance in search engine technology recently seems to be Google. It lists sites according to how many other sites link to them, so you know the first few sites listed are well-respected by others on the Web. Scott Rosenberg, a columnist on Salon, points out that a couple of graduate students came up with Google, and says, "That a couple of grad students could build a better search engine than a whole raft of media and technology companies with stock-market valuations in the billions does not speak well of how these firms are spending their budgets." Heh.

Oh yeah, and Ask Jeeves is kind of fun, too.

Eclectic collections of links

I've had The Web's Edge listed here for years now; it hasn't been touched in ages, but it's still eclectic and fun. Plus, the graphics are really neat.
Links from the Underground seems to have been transmogrified into Justin Whatshisname's online diary. I'm leaving it here for historical reasons, too.
A Thousand Points of Sites still works. It's kind of cute.
A page with links to sites with a whole lot of graphics.
The Frequently Asked Questions lists for all the Usenet newsgroups that have them. Still useful, and still maintained.

Emily Way (emily@vex.net)

Last updated December 30, 1998 (first time in almost two years, yikes)