Archaea on the Web

Our problem is to come up with strategies for searching, and then sort the many hundreds of possible links into useful and not-useful. I'll settle here for a bunch of examples, with some commentary on what they might be good for.

A pair of definitions from Tsute Chen's Glossary of Microbiology:

Archaea
An evolutionarily distinct group (domain) of prokayrotes consisting of the methanogens, most extreme halophiles and hyperthermophiles, and Thermoplasma.
archaebacteria
An older term for the Archaea.

How can we find things in the anarchy that is the Web? Web indexes are the best initial approach, and they come in two essential forms:

schemes for classifying sites by their content (YAHOO is a good example of this type)
indexes of the content of web documents, created by spiders and other web-cruising agents (AltaVista is a good example of this type)

Each of these has strengths and limitations and individual peculiarities.

YAHOO

A search for 'archaea' from YAHOO's first page yields this embarassment of riches. Note that YAHOO now offers a link to AltaVista:

Found 11 matches containing archaea. Displaying matches 1-11.

Yahoo Categories - Yahoo Sites - AltaVista Web Pages
Yahoo Categories
News:Current Events:New Form of Life Discovered

Yahoo Sites
News:Current Events:New Form of Life Discovered

Archaea
Archaea Research
Archaea Taxonomy
Domain Archaea - Comparative sequence analysis of 16S RNA molecules has elucidated that life on Earth is of 3 primary lineages, referred to as domains.
Microbe News Story - Archaea Triumph
Regional:U.S. States:California:Cities:Berkeley:Education:Colleges:Universi ty of California - Berkeley:Libraries and Museums:UC Museum of Paleontology

Web Lift to Any Taxon - complete listing of taxa ranging from Archaea to viruses.
Science:Biology:Marine Biology

Archaea@
Science:Biology:Molecular Biology

Archaea@
Science:Biology:Molecular Biology:Genetics

Archaea@
Science:Biology:Molecular Biology:Genetics:Model Organisms

Archaea@

AltaVista

An AltaVista search locates occurrences of words or phrases in web documents. The 'simple' form of the search does an implicit Boolean OR if yfou give it more than one word, but if you enclose a phrase in quotes ("...") the simple form will look for the phrase. The 'advanced' form permits greater control over searching. Very elaborate searches are possible, but we'll look at the easier ones.

A search for 'archaea' gets about 800 hits in AltaVista. 'Archaeon' gets more than 200. Here are a few of them:

Comparative structure database (the files are .ps --PostScript format, not easily decoded without additional software)
DOE Microbial Genome Initiative
Earth & Sky program
Eukaryotes in Extreme Environments (Dave Roberts)
DOE Extremophilic Microbes (a list of grants, with abstracts)