Internet Search Engines for education

Internet Search Engines

Search engines are like libraries, each one has its own collection of links. There are often overlaps between engines, but each site has unique results or ranks them differently. Try different types of search tools to vary the results. Use the help link to find out which features are used to refine the search.

Academic search engines focus on information for college students, but can be useful if you’re working on a paper or need detailed information on a topic.

Infomine http://infomine.ucr.edu/ from UC Riverside. Allows searches from several databases of evaluated websites. Includes papers and resources not available on other search engines.

Academic Info http://www.academicinfo.net/table.html websites evaluated by experts for accuracy and currency

Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/ Google’s latest entry uses scholarly sites.

Directories often have websites evaluated by experts and placed in categories. You can use the categories to help focus your search. Yahoo is the most well known directory. Search engines often offer a directory, but can be searched by keywords. A directory is searched using the general subject words. The results are websites that can be searched for the specific information.

Librarian’s Index to the Internet http://www.lii.org a directory of websites that have been evaluated for accuracy and currency.

Virtual Library http://www.vlib.org/ Evaluated and categorized by experts

General search engines use the keywords you enter to find what you want and rank the results. Often the Advanced Search allows you more opportunities to limit or broaden the search.

Google http://www.google.com ranks results in groups by site, places the sites with the most links to it at the top, and has a directory option.

About http://www.about.com/ creates results lists by topic so that it begins to feel more like an information portal or gateway

Altavista http://www.altavista.com/ has excellent limiting tools in the advanced search

Fast Search http://www.alltheweb.com/

Teoma http://www.teoma.com/ provides terms to narrow search, gives links to portals or other resources.

Metacrawlers search several search engines at once and give you results from all of them. Often the searches of some engines time out so that the results from that engine are not displayed.

Dogpile http://www.dogpile.com/

Ixquick http://www.ixquick.com/ Allows the searcher to choose the search tools

Mamma http://www.mamma.com/

Specialized search engines look at specific areas or for particular types of information.

Invisible Web http://www.invisible-web.net/ searches databases of information that are on private computers accessed through websites.

Search tool evaluations These folks watch search engines, evaluate them by size and efficiency. New search engines will be on their websites.

Search Engine Showdown by Greg Notess http://www.notess.com/search/

Search Engine Watch by Danny Sullivan http://www.searchenginewatch.com/