Cactus and Succulent Plant Mall

Searching for Cactus and Succulent Pages on the WWW

The amount of information on subjects related to cacti and succulents has exploded over the last ten years. Good tools are need to find what you are looking for. This page presents some of the main ones I use myself. I hope you will find them useful.

I now always use Google as a first choice search engine. It has one of the largest coverage of websites and seems to be able to return quality results, well ranked for relevance with a low incidence of bad links or pages. Also useful is the indexing of Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) and Word (.doc) files.

Search The Cactus and Succulent Plant Mall

Cannot find what you are looking for on the Google search?

I have noticed over the last 2-3 years that it has become increasingly hard to find the obscure and little referenced web pages. The rapid expansion of dynamically created pages has also made searching much more problematic. I have heard it said that there is a hidden www with perhaps as many as 10 or 100 times as many pages as are easily accessible in Google. Here are a few additional searches which may help to uncover a few of them.

Looking for more scientific information on cacti and succulents?

Search British Cactus and Succulent Society Websites		Search Personal Websites on the Cactus-Mall Server
Searches the following websites: BCSS National site, Fife Branch, Exeter Branch, Highlands and Islands Branch, High Wycombe Branch, Macclesfield.Branch, Oxford Branch, Northampton and Milton Keynes Branch, Portsmouth.Branch, Southampton.Branch, Teesside Branch and Zones 3, 12 and 15		Searches the following websites: columnar-cacti.org, cactus-mall.com, cactuspro.com aiguillongaumais.com, living-rocks.com, botanica.uk.net, bennyskaktus.dk, cactaceae.be, cactarama.com, lecactusalpin.com, les-cactus.com, cactuscollection.net, flore-succulente.com, frailea.com, mammillarias.net, opuntia-mammillaria.net, columnar-cacti.org, cocozzacollection.org.uk, gargamel-cactus.com, jmsolichon.com, shaboten.com, the-parodia.net, thelocactus.cactus-mall.com, tribecaceaeairt.com and yuccaagavaceae.com.

Search CSSA Affiliate websites on the Cactus-Mall Server Searches the following websites: CSSA, Cascade CSS, Central Arizona CSS, Connecticut CSS, Fresno CSS, Gates CSS, Houston CSS, CSS of Massachusetts, River City CSS, Sacramento CSS, Santa Barbara CSS, South Florida CSS, and Tulsa CSS.		Search Cactus and Succulent Nursery websites on the Cactus-Mall Server Includes: African Succulents, Agave Nursery, Aristocacti, Bach's Cacti Inc, Bob Smoley's Gardenworld, Bonsai Collectables, Botanike, Brookside Nursery, Cactibiosfera, Cacti Connoisseur's Boutique, Cactus Art, Cactus-Canyon, Cactus-Heaven, Cactus Specialties, Conophytums from Chris Rodgerson, Croston Cactus, Deawcactus, Fresh Acres Nurseries Ltd, Kakteen Haage, Kilnwood Cacti, Kuentz Cacti, Mesa Garden, Navajo Country, Plant Life Nursery, Pottokakthus, Richard & Wendy Edginton, Rio Grande Cacti, Paul Shirley Succulents, Planta Seca, Toobees-Exotics, Vivero Cactus, Viveros G D V, Uhlig Kakteen, Connoisseur's Cacti, Grigsbys.

Meta Search Engine

A meta search engine combines the results from a number of other search engines. I have frequently found this one, Dogpile useful:

Altavista

In the early days of the www Altavista was the best search engine. It has been extensively revamped over the years. It remains better at picking up obscure pages than Google at the the expense of a higher percentage of irrelevant pages - perhaps an unavoidable trade off. Another useful tool from Altavista is their Babelfish translation programme. It is safer to use this for translation into to your own language from one you don't know as the results can sometimes be unfortunate if you are not able to provide a reality check on the results.