search engines

Not only Google – there are many other search engines:  

Got a research paper to write? Want to research using the Internet? Good luck. There's a lot of junk out there — outdated pages, broken links, and inaccurate information. Using Google or Wikipedia may lead you to some results, but you can rarely be sure of accuracy. And what's more, you'll only be searching a fraction of all of the resources available to you.

Google, the largest search database on the planet, has a lot of information. But it's nothing compared to what else is out there. Google can only index the visible web, or searchable web. But the invisible web, or deep web, is estimated to be 500 times bigger than the searchable web. The invisible web comprises databases and results of specialty search engines that the popular search engines simply are not able to index.

In order to start researching like a librarian, you'll need to explore more authoritative resources, many of which are invisible. Note: Although some of the following resources are visible and indexed, they have all been included here because of their authoritative nature.

Deep Web Search Engines

1.     Clusty — A metasearch engine that combines the results of several top search engines.

2.     Intute — A searchable database of trusted sites, reviewed and monitored by subject specialists.

3.     INFOMINE — A virtual library of Internet resources relevant to university students and faculty. Built by librarians from the University of California, California State University, the University of Detroit-Mercy, and Wake Forest University.

4.     Librarians' Internet Index — A search engine listing sites deemed trustworthy by actual human librarians. 

5.     Internet Archive — A database of tens of thousands of movies, live music, audio, texts, that allows you to find old versions of web pages, over 55 billion.

6.     direct search — A list of hundreds of specialty databases and search engines. No longer maintained, but still perhaps the most complete list of the deep web.

Searching the Internet: QUICK TIPS

NOTE: These tips will work with most search engines in their basic search option.

·         Use the plus (+) and minus (-) signs in front of words to force their inclusion and/or exclusion in searches.
EXAMPLE:   +meat  -potatoes
(NO space between the sign and the keyword)
 

·         Use double quotation marks (" ") around phrases to ensure they are searched exactly as is, with the words side by side in the same order.
EXAMPLE:   "bye bye miss american pie"
(Do NOT put quotation marks around a single word.)
 

·         Put your most important keywords first in the string.
EXAMPLE:   dog breed family pet choose
 

·         Type keywords and phrases in lower case to find both lower and upper case versions. Typing capital letters will usually return only an exact match.
EXAMPLE:   president retrieves both president and President
 

·         Use truncation (or stemming) and wildcards (e.g., *) to look for variations in spelling and word form.
EXAMPLE:    librar* returns library, libraries, librarian, etc.
EXAMPLE:    colo*r returns color (American spelling) and colour (British spelling)
 

·         When searching within a document for the location of your keyword(s), use the "find" command on that page.

Adapted from: http://www.sc.edu/beaufort/library/pages/bones/bones.shtml

Last updated by E. Chamberlain,Friday March 30, 2007 , accessed on 29.6.08