Searching the Internet
Subject Directories and Indexes | Searching the Web | Search Engines
Metasearch Services | Social Search Engines | Other Services
Subject Directories and Indexes
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Academic Info | a site developed and maintained by Mike Madin. |
| arranged by subject. | ||
| divided into Gateways and Pathfinders. | ||
is a collection of annotated links to resources for college students from admissions to travel. |
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| Colleges and University Libraries | ||
| Dissertations Online: Top 30 Web Tools to Search, Download & Review | This guide provides information on locating free, open-source full-text disserations on a variety of subjects. | |
| Dissertations: PQDT Open | With PQDT Open, you can read the full text of open access dissertations and theses free of charge. | |
| Free ebooks | An alphabetical list of websites where free ebooks can be downloaded, read online, or searched for via directories or web portals. | |
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the public's library and digital archive. | |
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is a searchable, annotated subject directory of more than 4,000 Internet resources selected and evaluated by librarians for their usefulness to the public library user's information needs. It's meant to be used by both librarians and non-librarians as a reliable and efficient guide to described and evaluated Internet resources. One of its missions to provide services and information which enhance the value of the Internet to its ever-expanding and varied community of users. | |
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The Web Index | a research tool for Internet discovery |
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World Wide Web Virtual Library | is a distributed model for creating and maintaining a massive subject directory. Responsibility for maintaining various sections is carried out by volunteers will to build and maintain them for the good of the Virtual Library. |
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Yahoo | is one approach at bringing a sense of order into this enormous repository of information, data and knowledge. |
Searching the Web
Search Engines
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Alta Vista | provides search features and capabilities that include multimedia, translation & language recognition, and specialty searches. Alta Vista provided the first Web index in 1995, as well as multilingual, image, audio, and video search capabilities. Alta Vista has been awarded 61 search-related patents. |
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Ask.com | Founded as Ask Jeeves in 1996, Ask is a question-answering system allowing simply written queries that retrieve results using the ExpertRank algorithm, which identifies the most authoritative websites by determining subject-specific popularity. ExpertRank identifies topics, topic-experts, and the popularity of millions of pages amongst those experts to retrieve highly relevant results. |
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Bing | Microsoft's new search engine, described as a "decision" search engine, with the intention of helping you find the information you need to make relevant decisions (i.e, travel, shopping, health). Image, news, video, maps, and visual search are also provided. |
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Blackle | Blackle is a green-friendly, energy-saving search engine. White and light screens require more energy for monitors to display than do black and dark screens. Blackle is powered by Google Custom Search. |
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eHow | The eHow database contains over 250,000 help articles and more than 180,000 professionally written articles providing clear and concise directions. If you become a member, you can comment on articles and interact with other members through social networking tools. |
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Exalead | searches the web, your pc, images, video, Wikipedia, and more. |
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Excite | a web portal offering comprehensive search tools. |
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Find That File | nifty search engine where you can narrow your search down to file format, including video, audio, document, fonts, and software. |
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analyzes all the content on each web page and factors in fonts, subdivisions, and the precise positions of all terms on the page. It also factors in the content of neighboring web pages which enables Google to return results that are more relevant to user queries. |
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| Google Books Mobile | ||
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Hakia | Semantic web search, bringing search results from credible sites recommended by librarians. |
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HotBot | HotWired adds this Inktomi-based Internet search tool to its collection of hip tools for netizens. Advanced searches don't require any fancy search syntax. |
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Hunch | A search engine that is designed to aid in making decisions; knowledge based mainly upon user-input. |
| Scitopia | free federated search portal to the digital libraries of leading science and technology societies | |
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Wolfram-Alpha | A computational search engine using built-in algorithms and a data collection to compute the answer. Knowledge-based computing. |
Metasearch Engines
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dogpile | This highly rated metasearch tool uses one search box to wade through nine other services (Open Text, Lycos, Web Crawler, Infoseek, Yahoo, TradeWave Galaxy, Excite, Inktomi, and Alta Vista) and returns a single configured screen of results. |
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LightSwitch | is a search service with links to major search engines and to metasearch services. |
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SurfWax | On waves, surf wax helps surfers grip their surfboard; for Web surfing, SurfWax is designed to get the best grip on information, providing the "best use" of relevant search results. SurfWax's patent-pending design is the first to make searching a "visual process," seamlessly integrating meaning-based search with key knowledge-finding elements for effective association and recall. The Nautilus is used as a metaphor for knowledge search: a cohesive, spiraling matrix that embodies a powerful, integrated capacity to search, sort, extract and relate information within an elegant, simple "natural interface" to navigate the unstructured and vast Internet as well as enterprise intranets. |
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Webcrawler | top results from popular search engines. WebCrawler® was the first fully indexed search engine on the Web created by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington. In 2001, WebCrawler joined InfoSpace, which also owns and operates metasearch engines Dogpile and MetaCrawler, and provides the search results for Excite. |
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Yippy | queries several top search engines, combines the results, and generates an ordered list based on comparative ranking. This "metasearch" approach helps raise the best results to the top and push search engine spam to the bottom. Rather than delivering millions of search results in one long list, Yippy groups similar results together into clusters that help you see your search results by topic so you can zero in on exactly what you're looking for or discover unexpected relationships between items. Rather than scrolling through page after page, the clusters help you find results you may have missed or that were buried deep in the ranked list. |
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Zuula | is a customizable meta search service providing results from your favorite search engine unaltered, so you can check those first and then those from other search engines simply by clicking on their tabs. Zuula offers Web, Image, Video, News, Blog, and Job searches. Easily set your preferences for each search type and search engine, and in what order. |
Social Search Engines & Tools
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TweetDeck | a way to organize your Twitter tweets, and track specific topics. |
| socialmention | realtime social media search and analysis | |
| Topsy | real time search for the social web. | |
| boardreader | "Connecting communities through search." | |
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FeedDemon | a popular RSS reader for Windows. |
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Twittercounter | tracks Twitter statistics. |
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Klout | a benchmark for measuring social influence. |
| icerocket | a great tool for monitoring blog activity with trend comparison. |
Other Services
| Wink | Search for people | |
| Tile.net | Search a directory of e-mail discussion groups | |
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Free Public Records Search Directory | serves as a portal to public records from states, counties and cities in the US. |
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Google groups | Search Usenet Newsgroups |
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JuJu | is a job search engine rather than a job board. Juju's comprehensive search results link to millions of jobs found on thousands employer career portals, recruiter websites, and job boards all over the Internet, rather than to a limited set of job listings hosted directly on JuJu's own site. JuJu's goal is to make job searching easier than traditional online job search methods that take too much time and make it difficult for job seekers to find a comprehensive set of relevant jobs. JuJu's goal is to create tools that make jobs more accessible and job search results more relevant. |
Email and Telephone Directories
| Addresses.com | claims to be the world's largest email address database. It also has links to telephone directory services. |
| AmeriCom Area Code Decoder | will let you type in an area code and tell you the city, or vice versa. |
| AnyWho Directories | integrates traditional business and consumer white and yellow pages telephone listings with enhanced, Internet-based contact information such as E-mail Addresses and Web Site URLs. Toll Free and FAX numbers can also be listed. |
| Verizon SuperPages | also known as Yellow Pages. |
| Smartpages.com | is an online directory of business listings and city and shopping guides designed to help consumers shop, research products and services, locate merchants and plan entertainment, leisure and travel activities from SBC Communications. |
| Switchboard | allows one to search for a person, an e-mail address, a business, search the web, participate in message boards and get maps and directions. |
| Telephone Directories on the Web | with over 400 links to Yellow Pages, White Pages, Business Directories, Email Addresses and Fax Listings from over 170 countries all around the world. |
