Search Engines and Directories

Search Engines and Directories
An Internet Hotlist on Successful Searches

Introduction
This listing of search engines and directories will help students find new and more effective search tools.

The Internet Resources

Search Engines and Meta Search Engines

All the Web Advanced - Use the filters to execute a more accurate search of: Web News Pictures Video Audio. Has a query search guide
AltaVista Advanced - Topical searches aggregate information into highly segmented indexes, helping users refine their searches and quickly access the most pertinent and useful information.
Ask.com - Ask.com offers many innovative tools to help you get the information you need quickly and easily. Search Tools: Ask Blogs Image Search AskCity Maps & Directions News Search Shopping Search Weather Search Dictionary Search Conversions Famous People Search Stock Search Movie Search Smart Answers
Beaucoup - Search over a dozen search engines at one time, or click on one of the subject links from the main page to find specialized search tools and databases on specific topics.
Biology Browser - Browse for information in the life sciences by geography, organisms, and subject
Blinxx Video Search Engine - Video search engine allowing users to find online news, movie trailers, and popular multimedia segments from BBC News, CNN, Comedy Channel, YouTube, History Channel, NYTimes, etc.
Cha Cha Search Engine - ChaCha is available online and on your phone with information when you need it…any time, anywhere. Other services scan the Internet and return the thousands of pages that mathematically match your query. But, because our Guides are human, they can infer exactly what you need and provide the most relevant answers. Just try typing 'last night's Illinois college basketball game score' in a regular search engine. You'll get a lot of responses, but wouldn't it be better to just get who won and the score? That's the innovation ChaCha is bringing to the world – adding the ability to harness the power of the Internet and provide answers when you need them most. Try it now in any of three ways: MOBILE SEARCH - Even laptops can't always be everywhere, so ChaCha is there to help you get answers (or find the closest cup of coffee) when you're on the go. Just text your question to 242242 and we'll be there with the answer…OR LIVE GUIDED SEARCH - Not finding what you need with a search engine? Get a ChaCha Guide – a real person who asks you questions, understands exactly what you want, and sends you results that are dead-on. The brainpower behind ChaCha…OR INSTANT SEARCH - Just like all those other search engines... only better. Because ChaCha keeps getting smarter. Our search experts are constantly handpicking cool, hard-to-find sites so you get only the best, most relevant results.
Clip Blast Video Search - ClipBlast, a video search engine, crawls the web in search of video, then categorizes video files, web pages, and feeds so that the most relevant clips can be served up in real-time, on demand.
Clusty Search Engine - Clusty 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. But what really makes Clusty unique is what happens after you search. Instead of delivering millions of search results in one long list, our search engine groups similar results together into clusters. Clusters 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. When was the last time you went to the third or fourth page of the search results? 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
Google U.S. Government Search - Offers a single location for searching across government information, and for keeping up to date on government news.
Grokker - Generates visual maps of search results with related topics and categories. Similar to a Clusty search.
IxQuick Search Engine - The only search engine that deletes your personal data.
Killer Info - Clustered results from your favorite search engines.
Mamma Search Engine - We make it easier and faster for people to find information by gathering the most relevant results from the best search engines on the Internet.
Yahoo!Search - A general search portal that offers information on: Web Images Video Local Shopping and more

Blog Search Engines

Bloglines - Bloglines is a web-based news aggregator for reading syndicated feeds using the RSS and Atom formats. Mark Fletcher, former CEO of ONElist, founded the site in 2003 and sold it in February 2005 to Ask.com
Blogscope Blog Search - BlogScope is a search engine for the blogosphere with advanced analysis and visualization technology. BlogScope is outcome of an ongoing research project at the University of Toronto. As of Oct 2007, the system is indexing around 120 million articles from 14 million weblogs
Ice Rocket - This is a Blog search tool that covers: Blogs Web MySpace News Images
Technorati Blog Search - Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs, competing with Google, Yahoo and IceRocket. As of December 2007, Technorati indexes over 112 million weblogs.[1] The name Technorati is a portmanteau, pointing to the technological version of literati or intellectuals.

Search Engine Directories

About.com - About.com is an online neighborhood of hundreds of helpful experts, eager to share their wealth of knowledge with visitors. Every month, over 53 million people* visit us for help with everything from health care and parenting issues to advice on travel, cooking, technology, hobbies and more. And we offer solutions in the form of over two million hand-crafted, original articles, recipes, product reviews, videos, tutorials and more. All created by our network of expert 'Guides' - real people who, like all good neighbors, help others so that everyone's life gets just a little better
Awesome Library - Awesome Library organizes the Web with 35,000 carefully reviewed resources, including the top 5 percent in education.
Biography Center Directory - Search for biographies by alphabet and category.
DMOZ Open Directory Project - The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.
GE Source Geography - The Intute Geography Gateway provides free access to high quality resources on the Internet. Each resource has been evaluated and categorised by subject specialists based at UK universities. Our target audience is students, staff and researchers in higher and further education.
Google Directory - The web organized by topic into categories.
Google Scholar - Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.
Librarian's Guide to the Internet - You can search and browse our website for the best of the Web. We have over 20,000 entries, also maintained by our librarians and organized into 14 main topics and nearly 300 related topics.
National Science Digital Library - NSDL is the Nation's online library for education and research in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics.
PSIGate: Physical Sciences - Welcome to the Science, Engineering and Technology pages of Intute. Intute: Science, Engineering and Technology is a free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research, evaluated and selected by a network of subject specialists. It covers the physical sciences, engineering, computing, geography, mathematics and environmental science. The database currently contains 34819 records.
Science Journals Directory - OJOSE (Online JOurnal Search Engine) is a free powerful scientific search engine enabling you to make search-queries in different databases by using only 1 search field. With OJOSE you can find, download or buy scientific publications (journals, articles, research reports, books, etc.) in up to 60 different databases.
Social Science Directory - Welcome to the Social Sciences pages of Intute. We are a free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research, evaluated and selected by a network of subject specialists.
Time Magazine Archive - Collections are hand-picked covers and excerpts from the best articles on a wide variety of subjects. Use them as chronological guides to TIME's past coverage of a person, event, or topic. Also has search tips and other information

Search Engine Aggregators

A9 e commerce search engine - A9.com was created because we believe search is vitally important to e-commerce. With A9 Product Search, we power search and browse for the leading online shopping destinations and with Clickriver Ads, we deliver targeted advertisements directly to Amazon.com. Together, these initiatives help people find what they want on the world's leading e-commerce sites.
Dogpile Search Aggregator - All the best search engines piled into one.
FaveBot Intelligent Search using RSS - FaveBot is a service that keeps an eye on whatever keywords you give it to pull up related items from the Web. If you're familiar with Google Alerts, the idea is similar. In Favebot's case, you can take any keyword or set of keywords and apply it to the types of content you're looking to keep an eye on, be it photos, videos, blog posts, or podcasts. There are nine categories in all, and the system is designed to serve it up like a river of news with the most recent items appearing on the top.
Proteus Search Aggregator - Type keyword(s) then click a search button or view metasearch sites such as Dogpile and Metacrawler. You can also search by subject area. Metasearches:
SearchMash - SearchMash sorts the results into web pages, images, blogs, videos, and Wikipedia entries, all on one screen.

Social Search Engines and Suitable for ESL Learners

Del.icio.us Social Bookmarking - Del.icio.us (pronounced 'delicious') is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. It has more than three million users and 100 million bookmarked URLs Del.icio.us uses a non-hierarchical keyword categorization system, in which users can tag each of their bookmarks with a number of freely chosen keywords (cf. folksonomy). A combined view of everyone's bookmarks with a given tag is available; for instance, the URL 'http://del.icio.us/tag/wiki' displays all of the most recent links tagged 'wiki'. Its collective nature makes it possible to view bookmarks added by similar-minded users. Del.icio.us has a 'hotlist' on its home page and 'popular' and 'recent' pages, which help to surface interesting content and make the website an effective conveyor of popular internet memes and trends.
Middlespot - middlespot.com is a patented search interface for teachers, librarians, researchers and anyone who wants to interpret information faster from their search results, collect and annotate relevent results into groups, and share those collections with people relying on their expertise. you can... see your results as screenshots that you can pan and zoom like a map save and annotate relevant individual results to collections in workpads share workpads with others who are looking to you for your expertise best of all, you don't need to sign up or login to use middlespot.com middlespot.com's interface is broken into two areas, the traditional, linear text based search results on the left, and a new map like interface made up of a gallery of screenshots of those same results on the right. The screenshots allow you to visually scan up to 50 of your results, panning around and zooming into sites that draw your interest. When placing your mouse cursor over any screenshot, the associated text result will automatically appear in the orange highlight box.
Search Me - Search Me. It’s an excellent search engine that shows snapshots of the webpages in addition to text information, which makes it very accessible to English Language Learners. In addition, though, you can now create “stacks” of categorized sites, images, and videos; embed them in a blog or website; and/or email them to a friend or teacher. You can also write some kind of description, or tag, for each site. The primary difference between Search Me and Middlespot is that Search Me also includes the ability to collect and tag images and videos, and has a much more attractive interface. Searchme lets you see what you’re searching for. As you start typing, categories appear that relate to your query. Choose a category, and you’ll see pictures of web pages that answer your search. You can review these pages quickly to find just the information you’re looking for, before you click through.
Wink Social Search Engine - Wink People Search: Over 333,304,647 people on social networks and across the Web. Find people using name search, location, school, work, interests, and more. Wink is a community-based social search engine. It provides people search across social networks, and Web search based on user input. Wink is different from conventional search engines in that the relevant results are derived not just from machine algorithms, but directly from user input, such as social bookmarking, voting up or down, or blocking results that are considered to be spam, thus allowing users to collectively create their own search engine.

Additional Search Tools

Best Search Tools Chart - Translates complex searches to fit what each search engine 'understands'.
Brain Boost Metasearch - Brainboost is an metasearch engine designed to provide specific answers to questions asked in natural language. Brainboost works along the following steps: a user types in a question Using the question Brainboost generates a number of different queries that it submits to traditional 'dumb' search engines Brainboost downloads top several hundred pages returned by the search engines It reads the pages, locates and isolates the answers in the text of these pages Brainboost ranks the different answers based on its AnswerRank algorithm and displays them to the user starting from the best ones
Cyber Dewey - A Hotlist of Internet Sites organized using Dewey Decimal Classification codes.
CyberStacks Library of Congress Classifications - CyberStacks is a centralized, integrated, and unified collection of significant Internet resources categorized using the Library of Congress classification scheme. Using an abridged Library of Congress call number, Cyberstacks(sm) allows users to browse through a virtual library stacks to identify potentially relevant information resources. Resources are categorized: * first within a broad classification, * then within narrower subclasses, * and then finally listed under a specific classification range and associated subject description that best characterize the content and coverage of the resource.
Ditto Photo Directory - Ditto provides visual search of the web using pictures. Users are linked to the originating web site on which the pictures are located. Should you wish to use any picture, photo or artwork you see during the search process, you must obtain the appropriate permission from the owner of the material.
Genius Find Search Engine Directory - Directory of thousands of search engines, databases, and archives organized into categories and subcategories.
High School Hub - High School Ace is the trusted web guide to free quality educational resources for teens
Podscope Podcast and Multimedia Search Tool - Allow you to search podcasts and other types of multimedia for spoken words within any audio or video file.
Rocket News - Breaking news portal
Search Engine Finder Tool - A great tool to find the right search engine to meet your needs.
Search Engine Strategy Tool - One of the hardest parts about doing academic research on the Internet is figuring out where to start. A search engine or subject portal is usually the first thing to try, but which are the most useful for your research need? Fill in the short form below, and it will point you in the right direction. For every question, you can check any number of boxes (or none).
St. Ambrose Library - Hot Paper Topics, Resources by Major, Student Resources
University of Michigan Library Search Tool - Quick Search Power Search Find Databases Find e-Journals
Web Evaluation Checklist - Useful for determining if a Website is valid.

Content by jsotir, jsotir@waubonsee.edu
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Last revised Tue Nov 11 7:29:06 US/Pacific 2008