Two other popular search engines go by the names Yahoo and Google (welcome to the world of Internet names!)  There are literally hundreds of search engines, but I don't want to take up all of your time...I just want to show you a few alternatives and then you can "search" for your own favorite. 

Yahoo started somewhat differently than Alta Vista in that Yahoo is a human-compiled directory of sites. Every site that is listed on the Yahoo directory has been viewed by a real person to ensure that the website has been correctly categorized.  

For instance, if you were searching for a missions organization which does work in Africa, you could go to Yahoo and look at the listing of Christian missions agencies that have been submitted to Yahoo.  You can try it now. 

Go to yahoo.com.  Look for the section called Society and Culture, then click on Religion.  Click Faith and Practices and choose Christianity.  Choose Missions, then Organizations, and you'll see links to over 150 Christian mission organizations that are listed in Yahoo.

A quick glance through the list will reveal several organizations doing work in Africa.  Of course, Yahoo will also let you do a broad search of all the web pages it knows about around the world, but the categorized directory is part of what distinguishes this search engine.  

Google is different in that it gives special ranking to sites that are very popular.  That is, the first 10-20 matches on the Google site are pages that many other people have links to as well.  So the results you get on Google will be different than those on Alta Vista.  

Let's try our simple search on the word reformation on google.com.  If you do this, you'll see it finds about 45,000 web pages, and the first 10-20 matches are completely different than those we saw in Alta Vista.  This is why you might want to try a search on several different search engines when doing your research.  

Just a few more quick tips before we leave the topic of search engines, then we'll go on to Christian "portals" (What's a portal, you ask?  Keep reading.)