What is Fagan Finder?
Fagan Finder is a website designed as a tool, to help people find things, and it is meant to be a gateway to the Internet, a quality home page. Compare this to several websites. Like a search engine, we have searching capability, but we have many different searches. Like an exclusive directory, we include searching to or links only to high quality websites. Like a guide, we try to help you in your search experience.

Who works at Fagan Finder?
Currently Fagan Finder is the sole creation of me (“we”), Michael Fagan. However, if you'd like to contribute, work here, or just make a suggestion, please do. I currently enrolled in the Science and Business program at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada. I created my first website in 1998, and this is my first significant one since I closed that one in 1999. During that website, I was introduced to search engines from a marketing (aka search engine optimization) perspective, however today I am mostly on the researcher’s side. While I am not an information professional, I am an expert on search, due to my own research. Since October 2002, I have had my own weblog, Puzzlepieces.

What are our Favourite Sites?
Some day this item will have its own page; until then here it is. The best search engines are Google and AllTheWeb, especially when you include the other tools that these companies provide. The Open Directory is the best directory, Feedster is great for weblogs, and Wikipedia is great for reference. Note that information from Wikipedia, just like all other sources, should be cross-checked with other sources. For our favourite websites about searching, see Searching Links & Resources.

How does Fagan Finder work?
Different parts of Fagan Finder work in different ways. Technologies used include (X)HTML, Javascript, CSS, and PHP, several of which also make use of cookies. Virtually all tools includes on Fagan Finder are from other websites, which are brought together at Fagan Finder. Fagan Finder is mostly written in Araneae, an advanced text editor for Windows.

How do we choose which search tools and websites to include?
We use our own judgment in deciding what websites to include searching to, and what websites to link to. We only include websites with substantial free content, and do our best to include quality websites while excluding spam and websites selling things (other than the shopping page of course). We prefer website which do not require additional hardware or software, websites which load quickly, those that are easy to use, those that function in multiple web browsers, etc..

How did Fagan Finder Start?
Fagan Finder originally began as my attempt to make a page with everything that I used often, a website which I could access from anywhere and made my life a little easier. That was around October-December 2000 (I can’t quite remember). I began working on the current version of Fagan Finder in the summer of 2001 and it opened officially on October 13, 2001.

This page was last updated on February 26, 2004. Submit changes here.