Search Engines
A9 is a simple but powerful search engine devised by a division of Amazon.com and provides in one step, web and book keyword search capability. Included in the books searched are government documents and not only does the book search include titles, but for recent, books there is the capability to search for keywords in the book.
- Ask.com
- Excellent for general questions. A good staring point for most searches.
Frame your question carefully. Look over all the results provided before
exploring the individual links. Jeeves doesn't rank them according to
relevancy and the most relevant link is just as likely to be at the
bottom as at the top of the page. AskJeeves searches its own database,
and that of AltaVista, Infoseek, Excite, Yahoo, and Webcrawler. While
it only lists the top few from each of these, you are bound to find
at least one page of highly relevant information.
- Excite
- Put important key words or phrases inside quotes such as "auburn tiger".
Use the + (plus sign) and - (minus sign) as words to include (+) and
things to exclude (-). Do not put any spaces between the + or - sign
and the word to which it applies. Boolean absolute limits (AND, OR,
AND NOT) also apply as they also do in AltaVista. The feature "Are You
Looking For?" can be helpful in narrowing down the search; "Channels"
have news and reviews of other sites. More help: Getting
started or Power
searching.
- All the Web
- When you select All of the word s in the Search for
box, typing a word indicates that the word must exist in document;
-word indicates that the word must not exist in document. When
you select Any of the word s in the Search for box, typing
a word indicates that the word word may exist in a document;
+word indicates that the word must exist in a document; -word
indictes that the word must not exist in a document; and word1 word2
indicates that the exact phrase may exist in a document.
- GO.com (formerly InfoSeek)
- Searches the Web, GO Network select sites, Usenet newsgroups, company
directory, and timely news. Once you have selected a main topic, you
can narrow the search before you use the search index by selecting a
subtopic. Go is a subsidiary of Disney and provides links to ABC and
ESPN, along with a directory of the popular search topics on their site.
More help: Getting started
or Power searching.
- Grokker
- Graphic user interface for searching. Must have Java loaded to run.
- HotBot
- Some unique search features make this a very useful search engine,
including sorting results by date or media type. Two optional buttons
for simplify and modify are available. Modify narrows the search for
more accurate results. It allows specifying phrase searching or you
can use quotation marks around a phrase. A "must not" button eliminates
a term. A "should" selection tells the search engine to place more emphasis
on that term. Boolean searches are supported only through the pop-up
options. Case is insensitive except the very rare instance of mixed
case within the same name. Date searching gives an option of all in
the database, options for documents older or newer than a specified
date, or content posted within the last few days or months. You may
search by .edu to get educational institutions or .uk
to get United Kingdom or by actual domain name of a specific Web site
(www.hotbot.com).
for
Return results with
- WebCrawler
- Provides a simple interface for searching the Web, News, Photos, and phone directories online. One of the best for identifying major Web resources or most relevant sites for mainstream resources. It may be a good place to start for those new to keyword searching with full-text indexing. WebCrawler has the capability to Find Similar Documents. Another nice feature is the inclusion of a consumer-oriented subject directory.
- Wisenut
- Wisenut not only searches the Internet but will suggest alternative subject categories. The more keywords used, the more accurate the results will be. Single keyword searches tend to be even more imprecise than even other search engines using the same single keyword.
- Yahoo!
- Search Yahoo! differs from the main Yahoo! homepage in that it is a pure search engine site. Categories include: Web, Images, Directory, Yellow Pages, News, and Products.
News and Articles Engines
-
Select one of the following for more information and
a search box:
Top Sites
- Google News
- Google News offers links to some of the major news sources around the world and in multiple languages. There is also an option to search for keywords in the day's media reports. Google News searches through the same interface as the main Google system.
- Daypop
- Daypop searches both major media an independent weblogs by keywords and the results can be sorted by either relevance or by reverse chronological order. The ability to search weblogs from the interface is presently unique to this system.
- Find Articles
- Find Articles searches for articles published in web editions of journals in one convenient search interface. Many of the major weekly magazines are included and cover topics ranging from sports to politics.
Specialized Engines
-
Select one of the following for more information and
a search box:
Top Sites
- USA.gov
- The FirstGov website organizes access to US Government websites accessible to the public. The focus is on those websites that the public uses to file for permissions or comply with regulations rather than those sites that are more informational.
- Scirus
- Scirus provides scientific information published both on the Web and in articles published in Elsevier journals. Scirus links to databases such as ScienceDirect, the USPTO Patent Database, and Medline, among others.
- SciTech
Resources.gov Government Research Indexes
- SciTech Resources.gov links to indexes of research articles compiled by the US Government. Databases include Medline, AGRICOLA, and arXiv.org three excellent databases for medicine, agriculture, and physics pre-prints, respectively.
- Google: US Government
Information
- The Google search engine provides a specialized database for search just for information on US Government web sites. Google searches both the .mil along with the .gov domains. Searching is the same as the regular Google system
Select one of the following for more information and a search box:
Top Sites
- Dogpile
- Search up many engines at the same time, including formats such as
the Web, Images, Shopping, Audio, News, Multimedia, and Files. Accepts
quotation marks to indicate phrases, as well as the Boolean operators
AND, OR, NOT and NEAR. Search statements
are translated into a form that's acceptable to search engines not supporting
Boolean operators. Items retrieved from each search engine are presented
together. At the start of the results list from each engine, the number
of items found by that engine is displayed. In addition, your query
(in the form presented by Dogpile) is shown. You can choose the order
in which Dogpile accesses search engines in its Custom Search feature.
You can also opt to skip any engines that you don't want Dogpile to
search. More help!
- Ixquick
- Ixquick accepts natural language, boolean, and "altavista" search styles. Truncation is by *. Also, the best quality sites are rated by a "star" system where the more stars, the better the rating. It searches search engines such as AOL, FindWhat, MSN, AlltheWeb, Go, Netscape, AskJeeves/Direct Hit, Hotbot, Overture, Entire Web, LookSmart, and Sprinks.
- MetaCrawler (GO2Net)
- Accesses About, AskJeeves, FindWhat, Fast, Inktomi, LookSmart, Open
Directory, Overture, and Sprinks when it performs searches. The main
search box in offers three choices, any (to search for any of the words),
all (to search for all the words) the phrase (to search for the phrase).
In addition, you can use the plus and minus signs to require or exclude
keywords, and quotation marks to indicate a phrase. The Power Search
menu gives you the option of restricting your results by continent and
by three U.S. site domains (educational, commercial, and
governmental). MetaCrawler also includes a useful directory of
Internet resources. More help: Getting started and Power search.
- Search.com
- Accesses Lycos, WebCrawler, Google!, All The Web, Thunderstone, Infoseek,
DirectHit, HotBot, Excite, Galaxy, AltaVista and NationalDirectory.
Results from four or five engines are given at one time. Supports quotation
marks to designate a phrase, the plus (+) and minus (-) signs to require
or exclude words, the Boolean AND, OR, NOT operators,
and using parentheses in Boolean statements. Each resulting item includes
the title, the engine or engines from which it was retrieved, a description,
and the url. The lack of a date or indication as to size can be a drawback.
More help!.
Turbo10 not only searches several engines at once, it also allows the user to customize the engines that will be searched.
Subject Directories
Select one of the following for more information and a search box:
Top Sites
- Infomine
- INFOMINE is intended for the introduction and use of Internet/Web resources of relevance to faculty, students, and research staff at the university level. It is being offered as a comprehensive showcase, virtual library and reference tool containing highly useful Internet/Web resources including databases, electronic journals, electronic books, bulletin boards, listservs, online library card catalogs, articles and directories of researchers, among many other types of information.
- INFOMINE is librarian built. Over 30 University of California and
other university and college librarians have contributed to building
INFOMINE. We hope our service is of use to you and would appreciate
any comments. Subject categories are: Biological, Agricultural &
Medical Sciences; Government Information; Instructional Resources: K-12;
Instructional Resources: University; Internet Enhancing Tools; Mps &
GIS; Physical Sciences, Engineering, Computing & Math; Social Sciences
& Humanities; and Visual & Performing Arts. More help: Getting started.
- The Scout Report
- The Scout Report is a review service from the University of Wisconsin--Madison that evaluates web sites and provides a weekly report on new sites. The archives is searchable by keyword.
- The WWW Virtual Library
- The WWW Virtual Library is a subject organized list of links to quality information sources around the world. Each subject list is organized by an individual and the individuals are scattered around the world. Keyword searching of the subject lists is also available.
- Yahoo!
- Yahoo! is a consumer-oriented directory and search engine site. Yahoo!
is not the best place to start a search unless the searcher is looking
to buy something, but it does organize the Web well. Everything included
in Yahoo! is indexed by a human. Subject categories are : Arts &
Humanities; Business & Economy; Computers & Internet; Education;
Entertainment; Government; Health; News & Media; Recreation &
Sports; Reference; Regional; Science; Social Science; Society &
Culture. More help: Getting started and Power searching.
Top Sites
Vivisimo offers web news and specialty database searching and along with displaying results, will also cluster the results by topic in column on the side. By using the Advanced searching options, one can control where Vivisimo looks for information.
iBoogie offers convenient searches for web pages, images, video, and also includes a link to the DMOZ web directory. Advanced searching allows the user to further refine the search.
Select one of the following for more information and a search box: Technorati del.icio.us
Technorati allows users to "tag" articles that will allow searchers to quickly find articles dealing with similar topics.
Allows users to bookmark websites to del.icio.us and users may also share those bookmarks with others.