Amidst the fierce competition among Web search engines to become the main portal for people accessing the Internet, each has added a host of special enhancements to try to get ahead of the competition.

These features range from databases of news stories that supplement the standard fare of Web pages, to the addition of drop-down menus to relieve the pain of doing complex 'Boolean' searches.

Here are some of the features I?ve found most helpful in doing searches.

Easy To Use Menus

When it comes to simplifying a search -- especially the use of confusing Boolean connectors -- no site is better than HotBot.

HotBot has a drop-down menu at its main page that you can click on to easily select the connector you want to insert between words.

You can use the menu to limit your search to Web pages that have 'all the words' you enter in the search box (the equivalent of the 'AND' Boolean connector) or broaden your query to pages that have 'any of the words' (the equivalent of the Boolean 'OR'). Another choice is searching for the 'exact phrase,' which at most other search engines requires typing quotation marks around your search terms.

Or you can select 'Boolean phrase' and type in your own string of connectors if you prefer.

HotBot has a second drop-down menu that filters Web pages according to how recently they?ve been updated. That allows you to limit your search to pages that presumably have more current information.

While not as sophisticated as HotBot, the Fast search engine also has a menu you can use to plug in the most common Boolean equivalents -- all of the words, any of the words or the exact phrase.

More Web Pages Like This One

Often when doing a search you?ll find a Web page that is very close to what you?re seeking, and you?d like a list of other Web pages similar to it.

A couple of search engines allow you to do just that by clicking on a link next to the listing for the page. That will retrieve other sites that have similar content. Excite offers this as a link labeled 'Search for more documents like this one' that appears just below each entry in its list of retrieved Web pages.

At Infoseek this same feature is labeled 'Find similar pages.'

News and Current Events

If you?re looking for the most recent information on a topic, your best bet is probably the Excite. Tests have shown that Excite 'crawls' the Internet updating its index of Web pages more frequently than other search engines, and hence has the most current listings. It also generally has the fewest 'dead' links to pages that have been moved or discontinued.

In addition, Excite checks more than 350 Internet news sites several times a day (a list of the sites can be viewed online at http://nt.excite.com/sources) and adds that information to its index, along with feeds from a number of wire services. When you do your keyword search, the links to relevant 'News Articles' will appear at the bottom of the first page.

Even more comprehensive is Northern Light?s 'Special Editions' of news stories, an electronic library of 5,600 periodicals, wire services, books and reference works, some dating back to 1995. When you do a search in Northern Light, abstracts of stories from that database are included in the search results.

To view the full text of a story you have to pay anywhere from $1 to $4. If you can?t afford the fee, you can try going to the Web site of the publication to see if the article is available for free viewing there.

The full list of periodicals in the Northern Light database also is available for downloading.

I Want It All Now

Search engines take a number of different approaches to collecting information on Web sites. Some simply catalog millions of Web pages, while others have selective directories compiled by human researchers. Still others use intelligent search technology that ranks sites according to which are most popular with Web users.

Looksmart does it all -- and in a single search.

LookSmart has created a directory of 800,000 Web sites divided into 60,000 categories, put together by a staff of 200 editors.

LookSmart also has a partnership with the AltaVista search engine, so your search terms will be run through the index of 200 million Web pages maintained by AltaVista.

And LookSmart uses statistics supplied by the Direct Hit search engine to display a list of the most popular Web sites related to your search query.

Thus when you do a LookSmart search, you?ll get a list of: 'Category matches' from the LookSmart directory. ? 'Site matches' from AltaVista?s huge index of Web sites. ? 'Most visited Web sites' from the Direct Hit analysis. More Help With Search Engines

Besides the features I?ve listed here, search engines have added numerous other services to help refine your search.

Many allow you to limit your search to a specific 'domain' -- the portion of an Internet address that defines what kind of site it is, such as 'gov' for a government site, 'edu' for an educational site or 'com' for a commercial site. This can be useful if you?re looking for the Web pages of a government agency, for example, and want to exclude non-government sites from your search.

Some search engines allow you to limit your searches to recently updated pages (as I mentioned above with HotBot), or sort your search results to display the freshest pages first.

You also can focus your search at some sites to only retrieve links to graphic images on the Web.

These enhancements -- which you usually get to by clicking on the 'advanced search' link at the main page of a search engine -- are detailed in 'Search Assistance Features', an article at the Search Engine Watch site.

And for more help on selecting a search engine and fashioning a search, there?s a great tutorial put together by staff at the University of California at Berkeley Library.

Finally, you can keep up on the latest developments and participate in online discussions about search engines and their foibles at the 'Web Search' section of the About.com.

Chris Sherman, who heads a Los Angeles Web design and consulting firm, is the 'guide' who hosts the site. He posts a story at least once a week on the latest news in search engine technology.