| Web Guides
- A Web guide
is different from a search engine. Web guides are compiled
by humans; therefore, the sites are usually organized better and
for these guides below the sites listed are usually very
reliable. |
|
| Librarians' Index to the Internet
http://lii.org/ |
| The Librarian's Index was started and
is still maintained by a librarian, Carole Leita. This is a great site. This site
is a collection of some of the best and most reliable sites on
the Internet. You can either browse by category or use the
search box just like any search engine; however, only the sites
listed in this index are retrieved. After completing a
search pay careful attention to the categories listed at the
bottom of the entry - these can give you clues as to what terms
to use. All entries are annotated. |
|
| Yahoo
Directory
http://www.yahoo.com/ |
| Probably one of the
more extensive human reviewed ‘directory’ sites. It combines search
engine capability (using Google) with its own extensive categories and
site annotations. A great place to start a search if you have a popular or
general topic. |
|
| Argus Clearinghouse
http://www.clearinghouse.net/ |
| The Argus Clearinghouse is a
non-profit site with subject guides to the Web (which unfortunately are no
longer maintained). Though not completely up-to-date, the links may
still be helpful to you. The
site is categorized along the lines of an academic institution. Finding the right
category can be challenging (the old dilemma - is History a Humanity or Social
Science?). If it is, use the Search/Browse
link for a search box and a more in-depth table of
contents. Each site listed has a "Guide
Information" page specifying the URL, rating criteria and
scores, dates of the original and latest evaluations, and the
person responsible for the evaluation. |
|
| Infomine
http://infomine.ucr.edu/ |
| This site is maintained by several
University of California libraries. This group of
databases has over 40,000 resources. Use the Search
Page to search all of the databases simultaneously. |
|
| Internet Public
Library
http://www.ipl.org/ |
| Nonprofit site maintained by the
University of Michigan School of Information. Options to search or browse
categories, including large collections of reference materials, full-text
books, magazines, newspapers, etc. |
|
| Internet Scout Project
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/ |
| This site is maintained by the University of
Wisconsin. The Scout Project publishes the Scout Report, a weekly publication offering a selection of new and
newly discovered Internet resources of interest to researchers and educators.
All sites have a lengthy annotation and the dates they were
first and last reviewed. |
|
| AllExperts.com
http://www.allexperts.com/ |
| Use this site for locating a hard-to-find
resource or finding an answer to a tough question. Pick a category, locate
a viable expert within that category and then submit your question to get
an e-mail response. |
|
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| Evaluating Web Sites
- When
using the Web (or any information source) for research it is important
to make sure that the information is reliable.
Use the following sites to help you do this. |
|
| Four Criteria for Evaluating Web Sites
http://www.mildred-elley.edu/evaluating_web_sites.htm |
| This site
was produced by the Mildred Elley Library. It is a one
page sheet that offers the minimum of evaluation criteria. |
|
| Criteria for Assessing the Quality of Health
Information on the Internet - Policy Paper
http://hitiweb.mitretek.org/docs/policy.html |
| The Health Summit Working Group
published this article. This article deals with the
special problems of health information on the Internet. A
must read before you start surfing for medical sites. |
|
| Critically Analyzing Information Sources
http://www.library.cornell.edu/okuref/research/skill26.htm |
| From the Librarian's
Index to the Internet: ""Learning how to determine the relevance and authority of a given resource for your research is one of the core skills of the research process." This guide from the Cornell University Libraries is designed to help develop this skill." |
|
| Evaluating
the Quality of Information on the Internet
http://www.virtualchase.com/quality/index.html |
| This site
is maintained by Genie Tyburski who is a legal researcher for a
law firm in Philadelphia. (This law firm owns the
copyright.) This site is packed with information.
There is original content and practice tests. There is also
a form that allows you to request GREAT free articles, either
faxed or mailed to you! Legal researchers
may also find this site to be particularly helpful. |
|
| Evaluating
Internet Sites 101 http://library.albany.edu/usered/webeval/index.html |
| This site
was written by Carol Anne Germain and Laura Horn from the University at Albany.
The site has a series of slides with real examples of the types
of questions you will face when evaluating resources. The
more you use this site the better it gets. |
|
| The
Internet Detective http://www.netskills.ac.uk/TonicNG/cgi/sesame?detective |
| This site
is maintained by the Desire Project,
a major international project aiming to build large scale information networks for the research community. You
must register but it's free. This is a
tutorial with questions that you can answer - but beware they're
tough. You can navigate either with the arrows at the
bottom of the page or the links on the left. A good thing
about this site is that it helps you to decode URLs. |
|
| Web Site Evaluation Quizzes Do
you know the basics for evaluating information on Web sites? Click
here to take our short quizzes. |
|
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|
Search Engines
- A search engine is comprised of three different parts, a
spider or 'bot that crawls along the Web "looking" for
pages; a database that arranges what the spider finds; and an
interface with the searcher - this last part is the only part
you see. It is important to realize that you are not
searching the Web, you are searching the search engine's database
of the Web; therefore, all information may not be accurate and
you will never be able to search the whole Web. For more
complete results it is better to search at least three search
engines. See article
on search engine overlap. |
|
| Ten Rules For Using Search Engines
http://www.bibliodata.com/tenrules.htm |
| Quick list of things
to be aware of when searching the Internet. One important rule that
is left out is to consult a librarian if you cannot find the information
you need. |
|
| Listed in order of estimated size of database
based on Search Engine Statistics
by Greg R. Notess. |
| Google
http://www.google.com/ |
| Currently this is the best free search engine. Not only does
it have the largest database of Web pages it also brings back
the most relevant sites. One of the great things about
this site is the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.
Click on this if you are pretty sure that the site you are
looking for is going to be the first one returned (i.e. if you
are looking for a company, school or other organization where
the name is fairly unique.) The advanced
search page is not the best interface but it
works. |
| For brief help in
interpreting results from Google click Looking at the Results Carefully. |
|
| WiseNut
http://www.wisenut.com/ |
| This is a
relatively new search engine. They boast over 1.4 billion
pages and counting; however this is only the pages they have
identified. They have not indexed all the pages.
This search engine has relevance rankings similar to Google so
the sites returned are usually pretty good. You can click
on the categories at the top of the results page to focus in on
your search. Apparently WiseNut plans on growing because
their database can handle up to 1 trillion sites. |
|
| Alltheweb
http://www.alltheweb.com/ |
| Fast is
definitely quick with the return. The advanced
search is very nice. There are also links to MP3 and
Multimedia search engines. One thing to remember is that this
search engine has an "Offensive content reduction"
control and the default is ON. |
|
| MSN Search
http://search.msn.com/ |
| A good
thing about this site is that is gives you categories at the
beginning of the search results so that you can narrow down the
list to more manageable numbers if you want. The advanced
search is not very good, except for the fact that you can
limit the results to include images, video, MP3, etc. |
|
| Alta Vista
http://www.altavista.com/ |
| Alta Vista is
one of the original search engines. The search
assistant is not a help page but a guided
search. The advanced
search is only okay. The best thing about it is
that you can limit the results to one return per site.
This is one of the more customizable engines but it is not as
intuitive as the rest. |
|
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| Specialty Search Engines
- Specialty search engines work similarly to the general search engines
listed above, but they search for information within a particular topic
only. |
|
| Search
Engine Watch listing
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/links/specialty.html |
| Maintained by the
Search Engine Watch site, this page lists numerous discipline specific
search engines, such as those for health and medicine, computer science,
travel, finance, law, etc. |
|
| Meta Search Engines
- A
meta-search engine (also known as a mega-search engine) is an
engine that searches several different single engines at the
same time. While it sounds more efficient to use these it
generally is not because of technical reasons. While I
would never rely on only a meta-search engine I usually use one
in addition to the regular engines. |
|
| Ask Jeeves
http://www.askjeeves.com/ |
| This is a
nice search engine because it allows you to type in questions
without having to think of the keywords that encompass the information you
need. The first results are in the form of
questions with pull down menus. Use these pull down menus
to help focus on exactly what you want. If none of the
questions is close, then move on to the usual result list.
View the Web page by clicking on the word "Ask." |
|
| ixQuick
http://ixquick.com/ |
| You can choose different
media to search with this meta-search engine. You
can also do a complex searching such as Boolean (AND, OR
& NOT) and limit searches to titles. They have a great help
page. A list of which search engines it searches
appears after you have searched. |
|
| Mamma
http://www.mamma.com/ |
| Mamma, billed as
"the Mother of All Search Engines,"
searches 8 databases. You can limit to the Web (default),
images, MP3, or others. In the power
search you can choose other limits and filters. |
|
| Metacrawler
http://www.metacrawler.com/ |
| One of the
original meta-search engines, this is still a good one to
use. It searches 13 different databases (as of
5/15/01). Can limit to images or audio among others.
In the power
search you can specify the databases searched, how the
results are ranked, and how many returns from each search
engine. |
|
| Vivisimo
http://vivisimo.com/ |
| This site not only
conglomerates results from several major search engines into one results
list, but it also organizes pages into related categories for easy access
and a logical breakdown of larger result sets |
|
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| Image
Search Engines |
|
| Finding Images on the Web
http://www.bu.edu/library/training/webimages.htm |
| From the Librarian's
Index to the Internet: "A tutorial on the legal use of copyrighted images, image
searching, downloading, and use. Includes a great collection of links to art, science, map, advertisement,
photograph, and other image collections and image search engines. Created by art and art history
bibliographer Ruth S. Thomas at the Mugar Memorial Library of Boston University. |
|
| Alta
Vista Image Search http://www.altavista.com/image/default/ |
| A basic search engine
interface. You can choose to search for buttons to help
zest up your Web page. |
|
| Clip
Art Searcher http://www.webplaces.com/search/ |
| This page has several
different search engines to choose from, currently (12/2/02)Google,
Anzwers, Hotbot, Lycos, and two one-click searches - Yahoo &
Euroseek. Read the search tips for the first three. For the
last two, click on the appropriate category - for instance if
searching for clip art click on "Clip Art" on either
Yahoo or Euroseek. |
|
| Google
Image Search http://www.google.com |
| Click on the Images
tab to restrict your search to images. When you click on an image you want to see you do
not get a larger version of the image; you get a funky frame set
up. By clicking on the top picture you get a larger image. |
|
| Mediscan (Medical
Image Database) http://www.mediscan.co.uk |
|
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Help
with Searching - When looking for information on the Web it
is important to remember a few things.
First, think about your topic and write down
words that encompass your topic or that are synonyms for
it. For instance if your topic is dogs - "canine" is a
synonym. If the topic is smoking habits of 17 year old girls,
try "smoking AND female AND high school seniors."
Second, learn as much as possible about the
search engine you are using. You can use the operators
AND, OR & NOT to narrow or broaden your search in many
search engines but not all. SPARROWS AND COCONUTS would
return only those sites with both the words. TEETH OR JAW
would return sites with either of the words. HANDS NOT
FEET would return the sites that mentioned hands but did not
mention feet. NOT should be used sparingly
because you usually cut out relevant
articles. To search for a phrase you can
either put the words in quotes __"JERRY MCGUIRE"__ or many
search engines (such as Google Advanced
Search) have a place for
limiting the search to a phrase.
Third, persistence is essential. Many
times the information you need is somewhere on the internet, it
just takes time to find it.
|
|
| Below are two sites with
quick cheat sheets for the major search engines. These
sites tell you what features are available for the engines. |
|
| Search
Engine Features http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/features/ |
|
| Web Searching Tips
http://searchenginewatch.com/facts/index.html |
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