It has been said that the World Wide Web is like a library where all the books have been tossed on the floor. When it comes to searching for magazines and newspapers, the Web is more like a publication's morgue with an index system devised by librarians long since dead.

That's the way I felt before I made it my mission to devise a list of helpful news search engines on the Web. I've split the search engines into two categories; those that allow searches for publications and those that allow for content searches.

Many sites allow searching for publications by geographic area. Within the United States, these are organized by state and, except for Canada, other locales are organized by country.

Among the best of these is Newspapers Online , which has links to tons of newspapers and trade, religious, specialty and business publications. It also links to state press associations and college newspapers. Although it does not provide a complete list, its low graphic content and wide ranging offerings make it a very effective search site.

The Association Alternative Newsweeklies has a well organized directory of member newspapers. The site boasts not only an index of newspapers links organized both regionally and alphabetically, but also has a brief description of the newspapers, including information on demographics of readers and circulation.

The American Journalism Review site has a large number of geographically organized newspapers, both within and outside the United States. It also lists and links to the 50 largest circulation magazines in the States and the 25 largest circulation magazines in Canada. Not every large circulation magazine has a link because many do not have web pages.

The Magazine CyberCenter is a very useful list-and-link site. It offers not only searching by title and niche but has descriptions and email addresses of the magazines it lists. The Magazine Mall (http://www.magmall.com) has a more extensive database of magazines but less extensive information about the magazines and more dead links. The Mall, as its name implies, is set up as a shopping site for magazine subscriptions.

The eZines Database allows searching by category and by title or keyword for e-zines. The owner defines e-zines very broadly so the well-structured results include the web pages of national print magazines.

K.L.G. Microcomputer Software hosts a site that it claims has a "comprehensive list of Media links, resources, sites, pages." The massive number of links seem to be able to back up that claim. This site tends to be slow in loading and may appear disorganized because of its comprehensiveness.

Other serviceable list-and-link publication database sites include:

The Ultimate Collection of New Links links to more than 8,000 newspapers around the globe

Ecola Newsstand allows you to search for a publication by title or by niche

Electronic Newsstand allows searches for magazines links by title or type

Newspapers On The Net -- has an alphabetical listing of Newspapers in and outside of the United States

English Language News Around the World offers a linked index of English-language news

MediaINFO Links is an Editor & Publisher's searchable list of 2,490 newspapers on the web

The second category that allows you to create your own search categories within the content of publications on the web.

One site that crosses the bridge between searches for publications and searches for stories is My Virtual Reference Desk . It's a very useful starting point.

I've found Excite's Newstracker to be the most thorough of these for tracking recent news. Once you've input your search criteria, the site will find newspaper stories that include your criteria and will produce links to the stories. You can create as many different subject searches as you want, but the system will only keep a story for you for two weeks, so it is not useful for finding archives.

Par·a·digm NEWS searches casts a search over news specific sites every few hours and archives the results, allowing you to do content searches for news.

Infoseek will email you daily headlines related to criteria you input from Reuters, Business Wire and PR Newswire. You must go to their site to retrieve the stories that match the headlines.

Scoop! Direct also emails you newspaper, wire service, trade and journal stories according to your personalized settings.

Newsworks allows for content searches of more than 100 United States newspapers.

Two last sites that are useful are InfoBeat , which allows you to pick from pre-set categories and will email news that match your picks and your demographics, and C|Net's new Snap! site , which, again, will search through some of the publications on the Web, including magazines, for subjects or keywords.