If you are at all interested in the Arts then Artcyclopedia is a specialist search engine that you must have a look at.

This site (http://www.artcyclopedia.com) has built up an index of hundreds of web museums that is extremely easy and quick to use. Also the database has links for over 7000 artists and their web pages.

When you search for a particular artist a list is displayed of all the on-line museums and galleries that have exhibits from that artist, plus links to any news articles. On the gallery sites most of the pictures are displayed as small, thumbnail images, which are links to larger images.

What is so impressive is the speed of the search. Most of the pages have images on them and you would expect this to slow down the speed of opening each page, but this does not happen. Obviously sufficient resources have been put into the site to make it very ?user friendly?.

The Monthly Article is always worth reading and normally contains many links to make it a complete research piece on the current topic. There is also a list of all the previous monthly articles for you to peruse.

The art museum list contains links to on-line museums throughout the world in over fifty countries, with an alphabetical list of the galleries for each country.

There are many more links and features that are all logically grouped and easy to find on this site. Artcyclopedia does not have any sophisticated graphics or outstanding animations and I was very pleased about that. This does not make the site boring, but does make it a very practical site to use that has obviously been designed by somebody with a good logical mind and a lot of common sense. Too often a web site becomes too involved with its design and forgets the purpose of the site; this is definitely not the case with Artcyclopedia.

I have never found any link from this site that did not work and that must be a high priority for any specialist search engine.


If you have any particular questions about a piece of art work or an artist then there is a Talk Back section where you can leave questions or comments and hopefully attract the attention of another user who may be able to answer your query.

The only draw back to this site is that you find yourself going from gallery to gallery, and artist to artist and looking at all of the wonderful works of art that you can find from this site. It is not unusual to find a couple of hours have passed whilst you have been using links from Artcyclopedia. You have been warned!

If you are interested in the arts then this site is one you must add to your Favourites list, but make yourself comfortable, as you may be on-line for quite some time.