Search Engines

A short list of some of the more useful and powerful search engines available

Tips | Pick Engine | Engine Lists | Deep Search | Powerful Searches | Directories | About Searching

Tips:

• Put quotes around a phrase to search for the entire phrase, e. g. "martha's vineyard".
• Use AND, OR and NOT for Boolean searches, e.g. apple AND (pie OR tart) .
• Omit verbs and common words such as: a, an, the, of.
• Use synonyms such as: "automobile emissions" OR "vehicle emissions" [also illustrates use of quotes and Boolean OR]
• Try the same search on different engines. No search engine indexes all sites.
• Some search engines support stemming or truncation. If you search for something like teach math it will not find math teacher or teaching math. Some search engines support stemming with the asterisk e.g. math teach*

Beaucoup - a list of 2500 search engines including many foreign ones.

Infomine Scholarly Internet Resource Collections

Intute Intute is a free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research. The service is created by a network of UK universities and partners. Subject specialists select and evaluate the websites in our database and write high quality descriptions of the resources.

CompletePlanet The Deep Web Directory 70,000 + searchable databases

AltaVista, a former heavy weight champion, is first in the list only because it begins with A. It was sold again in February 2003 to Overture, a pay-for-placement service. Overture auctions placement in search results to advertisers; good for them lousy for you. AltaVista was revamped in 2002 to include a useful Image, Audio & Video search. Another wonderful feature is the foreign language translator which translates (English to and from: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Japanese and Chinese and Russian to English and German to and from French). Enter a URL and the whole web page will be translated. Use the special features, but for regular searches first try other engines or a metasearch engine like Ixquick or Vivisimo.)

Answers.com delivers encyclopedia like results rather than links. It is a reference search service with content from encyclopedias, dictionaries glossaries and atlases. Excellent for quick information on a topic

ASK.com Searching for highly authoritative web pages, Ask uses the retired brand Teoma (expert in Gaelic) Engine which ranks a site based on the number of same-subject pages that reference it. Results are grouped by subject and as a listing. A suggested refinements section helps to focus your search. Under the suggested refinements are resource pages containing site summaries.

Bing is an algortihmic search engine from Microsoft. Search pages are customized according to what type of search you do (health, travel, shopping, news, sports). The algorithms determine the order and layout of the page. This can include anything from images to videos and local results.

Ditto.com is a visual search engine. Search for photographs and other images across the internet. There are some annoying pop up ads on this page but it seems to return a good selection of images quickly in the form of thumbnails.

FindHow a seach engine for How to's. "To empower people to achieve success at every task, in whatever role and stage of life they are in, by simplifying and speeding access to trusted, reliable How-To content on the Internet. "

FOTOSEARCH is a commercial site for images, but, as was pointed out to me, you don't have to use the images. You could just view them. At upwards of $400 per picture students are unlikely to be dropping these into a presentation. Good for browsing though.

It's hard to imagine some things being any better: the DC-3, college in the 60's, Torvell & Dean. Google, however, continues to add features that improve this "best search engine". Google and Google's Advanced Search are designed to find the most relevant Web pages. This is the search engine by which all others are judged. Start with Google and you probably won't have to go anywhere else.

Google has several links just above the search entry box plus a "more" link. They vary from time to time and have included:

Web for regular internet text searches.

Images search is as good for images as the regular Google is for text.

Maps lets you see a map or a satellite view of most locations in the United States. You can also get directions, business locations and contact information. Try typing in your zipcode. The pan and zoom features are amazing. Also see the Rumsey ancient map overlays. Also try Google Earth, a free download for satellite and arial images.

News puts related news stories from 25000 sources during the last 30 days in the same search grouping.

Shopping is a shopping robot that harnesses Google's powerful search capabilities to find the lowest prices for any item on the web. Use it in conjunction with the number range operator .. to search for a range of prices.

GMail A free but ad support web mail client.

Labs all the cool new features under development.

Maps lets you see a map or a satellite view of most locations in the United States. You can also get directions, business locations and contact information. Try typing in your zipcode. The pan and zoom features are amazing. Also see the Rumsey ancient map overlays.

Books allows for full text searching of selected books.

Groups for usernet discussion groups.

New features being tested are

• Language Tools translates (English to and from: French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Spanish and German to and from French) [See Babelfish for Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Russian ] Search for pages written in a specific language or located in a specific country.
• Number Range use a double period between two numbers to search for things in that range. e.g. dvd players $250..$350 will search for players in that price range.
• Scholar is a new search service aimed at academics. It returns citations from offline material such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, pre-prints, abstracts and technical reports as well as internet accessible material. In Beta as of 11/18/2004.

A metasearch engine that applies your search query to 14 search engines. Ixquick lets you search for MP3 files, photos, and news from six sources in plain English or with Boolean operators. Comprehensive results with few redundancies.

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More like a scrapbook than a search engine, Spezify pulls pages from a large number of websites in different visual ways. lt shows you blogs, videos, microblogs and images.

A search engine and teacher'sresource. "At Thinkfinity.org, you'll find primary source materials, interactive student resources and grade-specific research lists." "All of Thinkfinity.org's 55,000 standards-based K-12 lesson plans, student materials, interactive tools and reference materials are reviewed by the nation's leading education organizations to ensure that content is accurate, up-to-date, unbiased and appropriate for students."

Vivisimo is another metasearch engine that clusters listings in folders. A clean design along with options for configuring the page view (only in Internet Explorer) make this new tool worth looking at. They also have a toolbar for Firefox called improbably, Clusty.

Wolfram Alpha is a compuational search engine, the search engine you didn’t know you needed. While other search engines find things that already exist on the internet, Wolfram Alpha answers questions and also gives detailed information from real sources in the realms of science, math, geography and demographics. It performs numeric calculations on the data and displays the results in graphs and tables. Try searches such as "Joshua Jennifer", "weather 02575" or "gdp usa" (all without quotes).

Image & Music Search

Polar Rose does face regognition with any phota posted to any web site.

Pandora will build a list of like artists from your starting list.

Consumer electronic devices fron Retrevo will give you information about your device categorized by manufacturer documentation, reviews and posts.

Directories

Abondance, search engines in French. Also see their main page.

Search through a million PDF files at Adobe PDF Search. It will convertto PDF such formats as Word, Excel, WordPerfect

Lycos

Some basics of searching including Search Engine Links, Search Engine Tips and the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT and NEAR.

What do other people search for? Try Google Zeitgeist

MVRHS Library Main Page

updated 02/04/2010