How is it different from Infoseek, Lycos, or other Internet search engines?
Though there are similarities in the way that the Astronomical Image Library automatically indexes web sites and allows people to search their contents, there are several fundamental differences that make this service much more useful for finding astronomical images on the Internet. To minimize the number of irrelevant results of a search, our site indexing software will only visit web sites that we have manually verified to contain images of astronomical objects. The search engine also gives a particularly high relevance to sites that it suspects has images of the object in question. Of course, without manually checking every web page in the database, it is impossible to guarantee that every suggested page will have an image of the object in question, but you will find the results of the Astronomical Image Library to be much better than from a non-dedicated service. Many astronomical objects are given more than one designation (a Messier and an NGC number, for example). If the Astrono
