Search Engines

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Subject Directories

Overview of topics helpful for  researching background information.

• DMOZ Open Directory 
  • DMOZ Open Directory - Largest human-edited directory on the Web.
• Google Directory
  • Itemized into 15 categories from Arts to World information.
• Yahoo! Search Directory
  • Over dozen categories including Arts & Humanities to Society & Culture.

Subject-based Gateways

Created by librarians or experts,  these sites are also known as virtual libraries.

• BuBL
  • The Bulletin Board for Libraries (UK-based) organizes academic specialty links into the nine Dewey Decimal Classification system.
• Infomine
  • Librarian-reviewed virtual library containing mostly scientific academic Internet resources including databases, e-resources, bulletin boards, mailing lists, articles, and directories of researchers.
• Librarian's Index to the Internet
  • Compiled by public librarians, websites chosen for content and reliability.
  • Best place to start looking for Internet sources for your papers and research.
• Voice of the Shuttle
  • University of California at Santa Barbara. Database of dynamic content on the web that covers humanities, literature, history, mathematics, music, science and other liberal art disciplines.
• Best Information on the Net
  • Prepared by the librarians at St. Ambrose University.  Links to web pages by subject or discipline. Includes Hot Paper Topics and Help for Writing Papers under the Students Resources link.

Search Engines: 

Search engines make use of robots, spiders,  and crawlers which trace hyperlinks across the Web.

• AltaVista
  • Searches for text and images and translates foreign language web sites.
• HotBot 
  • Advanced search functions offer ability to search in combination of forms (i.e. images, video)
• Teoma
  • Results are ranked on its subject-specific popularity (number of Web pages about the referenced subject) as well as its general popularity (number of all web pages referenced to this page).

Meta  Search Engines

Metasearchers or crawlers search several  search engines simultaneously.

• Excite
  • Searches leading Web search engines: Google, Looksmart, Ask Jeeves, About, Overture, FindWhat, FAST, Open Directory, Search Hippo and Sprinks.
• IXQuick
  • Results are preceded by one or more stars which indicate how many search engines included the item in  top ten results.

Searches news, MP3 or image files.

• Vivisimo

• Enter a search term and Vivisimo retrieves matching responses from major search engines as well as cluster pages into categories.