Web Search Tools
This guide covers
Subject Directories
Subject directories are human created, selective, and arranged by topic. They are good for broad topics and for finding a few good sites on a particular topic.
Academic
- Academic Info (US) - scholarly resources, including admissions test preparation sites
- BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (Germany) - multi-disciplinary scholarly web resources
- BUBL Information Service (UK) - all academic subject areas
- Digital Librarian (US) - a librarian's choice of the best of the Web
- INFOMINE (US) - scholarly web resources
- Intute (UK) - web resources for education, with evaluations and descriptions
- ipl2: Information You Can Trust (US) [successor to the Internet Public Library (IPL) and Librarian's Internet Index (LII)] - authoritative web sites
- Open Directory Project (ODP) (International) - largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory on the web
- Pinakes (UK) - links to major subject gateways
- The Scout Archives (US) - critically annotated, carefully selected web sites and mailing lists
- SSRN (Social Science Research Network) eLibrary - scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers
- Virtual Learning Resources Center (International) - academic information websites
- WWW Virtual Library (International) - high quality guides to particular sections of the web
General
- About
- Complete Planet - deep web directory
- Yahoo Directory
Canadian
Search Engines
These are machine generated, non-selective, and search as many web pages as possible. They're good for unique or specific keywords or topics.
- Ask.com
- Bing (formerly Live Search)
- Blekko
- DuckDuckGo
- Google Scholar - a scholarly subset of the Google database
- Scienceresearch.com - scientific journals and public science databases
- Scirus - for scientific information
- Spezify - visual web search includes blogs, videos, microblogs and images
- WorldWideScience - global science gateway
- Yahoo
Blog & Social Media Search Engines
- Bloggapedia
- Bloglines
- Blogdigger
- Blogscope
- Google Blog Search
- IceRocket
- Technorati
- Topsy - real time search for the the social web
Meta-Search Engines
Cross-search multiple subject directories and search engines.
Beta, Experimental, New, Specialized
A variety of tools and resources.
- Creative Commons
- Creative Commons Canada
- Google Book Search (more on Google Print...)
- Google News Archive Search
- Microsoft Academic Search - academic web sources for computer science
- OAIster - online collections of books, journals, audio, images, movies
- The Infography - professors, librarians, and other scholars recommend the best sources of information about their subjects of expertise
- iTools - search, language and research tools on one page
- LISZEN: Library & Information Science Search Engine
- Soople - easy expert search in Google
- WayBack Machine (Internet Archive)
- WolframAlpha - a computational knowledge engine
- Zanran - search engine for data & statistics (graphs, tables and charts retrieved)
Guides
More on web searching & web search tools.
- AskScott
- Google Guide - an online interactive tutorial and reference for experienced users, novices, and everyone in between
- The Internet Tourbus
- Search Engine Colossus
- Search Engine Showdown
- Search Engine Watch
- Web Search Guide
- WebLens
Evaluating Internet Resources
- Evaluating Web Pages (Berkeley)
- Evaluating Web Pages (Duke)
- Evaluating Web Resources (Widener)
- Evaluating the Quality of WWW Resources (Valparaiso)
- Evaluation Criteria (New Mexico State University)
- How to Evaluate a Web Page (Colorado State)
- Evaluating Primary Source Web Sites (RUSA History Section)
Citing Internet Resources
Last Reviewed: May 17, 2012
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