College of Charleston Libraries mural photo

Web Searching (Subject Guides)

General Search Engines

Google
"+" searches stop words, keyword, "-" removes keyword. Double quotes for phrase. Go to Google's Advanced Search. Download Google tip sheet.
Google Guide
Google Guide is an online interactive tutorial and reference. Includes information and instructions about Google's capabilities and features.

Yahoo!Search
Different than the Yahoo directory and Google search.

Twingine
searches Google and YahooSearch simultaneously and presents results side by side on a split screen.

Ask.com

Mooter
Clusters search results in categories.

Exalead
Although new and relatively small, this search engine has many features in its advanced search such as field delimiting, country limits, and date and field restrictions.

Live Search
Formerly MSN Search

Sputtr
Sputtr provides access to many search engines on one page. There is one search box and over 35 colorful search buttons, one for each search engine. It’s not a metasearch engine but a site that allows you to repeat your search in many search engines from one search box.

Intelways
Intelways provides one search box from which you can repeat your search in multiple search engines. It is similar to Sputtr.

back to top

^ go to top

Metasearch Engines

Metasearch engines, also called parallel search engines or simultaneous search engines, search several different search engines and web directories at the same time.

Clusty

Dogpile
Dogpile metasearch brings together results from the following search engines: Google, Yahoo! Search, Live Search, Ask.com, About, MIVA, LookSmart, and more.

I Boogie

Fazzle

Ixquick

EZ2Find

Query Server

back to top

^ go to top

International Web Search

Portals to the world
links to electronic resources from around the world organized by the library of congress

Country Based Search Engines

Fagan Finder’s (Search Engine Ultimate Interface)
Use this search engine when you are using words that include letters with diacritical mark such as a circumflex, accent mark or umlaut --Example: café or München.

One World - Nations Online

Search Engine Colossus

International Google

Google Translate
Search foreign Web sites in English and have them translated for you. Expect a few inaccuracies.

International Yahoo

The Translation Wizard
includes nearly 50 languages!

^ go to top

Academic Web Resources

Google scholar
Subset of google that includes scholarly literature, such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, book citations, pre-prints, abstracts, and technical reports from all areas of research.

Search edu
Limits searches to ".edu" sites. Includes links to other powerful search engines and calculators.

Scirus
“Scirus is the most comprehensive science-specific search engine on the Internet. . . . Scirus searches over 415 million science-specific Web pages….”

Open J-Gate: Online Database of Open Access Journal Articles
Electronic gateway to international journals in open access domain.

Directory of Open Access Journals
Find full text, peer reviewed, open access journals.

Using the Internet for Scholarly Research

Learning, Teaching, and Innovative Technologies Center, MTSU

InterDok. Directory of Published Proceedings.
Since 1965, InterDok has identified resulting material from 280,000+ conferences, congresses, meetings & symposia.

^ go to top

Books Web Search Tools

Book Searching
Contains hints on book searching from Search Engine Showdown.

Google Book Search
searches the full text of select books. beta mode.

Internet Archive. Text Archive
Contains collections from American Libraries , Canadian Libraries , Universal Library, Open Source Books, Project Gutenberg, Children's Library, and Arpanet.

Online Books Page
The Online Books Page is a website that facilitates access to books that are freely readable over the Internet. It also aims to encourage the development of such online books, for the benefit and edification of all.

Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books.

WorldCat.org
WorldCat is the largest library network in the world, includes 1.3 billion items in more than 10,000 libraries worldwide. In beta.

College of Charleston Libraries-Online Reference-Books

^ go to top

Learning Objects and Classroom Resources

MERLOT: Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching

MIT open courseware

Open Content Sources for Teaching

BELLE Project
Broadband Enabled Life Long Learning

CAREO
Campus Alberta Repository of Educational Objects

National Foundation Science Foundation Resources

World Lecture Hall
free online course material from around the world.

Federal Resources for Educational Excellence
free

Learning Objects at Wesleyan University

Wisconsin Online Resource Center

CLOE
The Co-operative Leraning Object Exchange

Exploritorium: The Museum of Science, Art, and Human Perception

Syllabus Finder
Center for History and New Media

Fathom
Online resources from Columbia University

Learning Objects Collection
Comprehensive list of learning objects from the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

back to top

^ go to top

Subject Directories

Librarians Index to the Internet

WWW Virtual Library
the oldest catalog of the Web, started by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of html and the Web itself, in 1991 at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

Internet Scout Project
Since 1994, the Internet Scout Project has focused on research and development projects that provide better tools and services for finding, filtering and delivering online information and metadata.

BUBL Information Service
Selected Internet resources covering all academic subject areas. Centre for Digital Library Research, Strathclyde University, Glasgow G1 1XH, Scotland

Open Directory

Internet Public Library

Voice of the Shuttle: Web Site for Humanities Research

^ go to top

Invisible Web

Complete Planet
an index to 103,000 databases

Infomine
Scholarly Internet Resource Collections

FirstGov
The U.S. Government's Official Web Portal

GPO Access
access information from all three branches of the U.S. Government using the Government Printing Office Web site.

Digital Librarian
"a librarian's choice of the best of the web."

MagPortal
link to "free" magazine articles using catagories or search engine.

^ go to top

Images

Picture History
historical images

Ditto
visual search engine

Finding Images on the Web
Includes images in the public domain, image copyright, and information about downloading and inserting images.

Google Image Search

New York Public Library Picture Collection
a collection of 30,000 digitized images from books, magazines and newspapers as well as original photographs, prints and postcards, mostly created before 1923.

Digital Librarian -- Images
selective and somewhat random list

Fagan Finder -- Image Search Engines

OAIster
It is a Mellon-funded project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Services, to create a wide-ranging collection of free, useful, previously difficult-to-access digital resources that are easily searchable by anyone.

Prints and Photographs Reading Room
Library of Congress

Cartography Associates Visual Collections
Images of Art, History and Culture.

^ go to top

Multimedia

Yahoo Search
limit searches to images or videos

Blinkx
searches video news clips, your desktop, and more.

Google Video

Yahoo! Video

AltaVista Video Search

^ go to top

Institutional Repositories

SPARC Resources -- Collected Repositories

University of California Digital Repositories
Searches both eScholarship Repository (working papers, research, technical reports, etc.) and UCIAS Digital Collection (peer-reviewed papers, edited volumes, and monographs).

^ go to top

Preprint Services

Blogs

Podcasts

Podscope
This search engine helps locate podcasts by the words spoken in them.

Everyzing
“EveryZing creates a text index of the audio data from audio and video files, using the industry's leading speech-to-text technology from BBN Technologies, to enable search within the spoken words of media, not just within the metadata.”

Podcast Alley
Podcast Alley is a podcast lovers portal. It Features a Podcast Directory and is searchable by subject.

Yahoo! Podcasts
Winner of Webby Award

Podcast Free America

Webcasts/courses
UC Berkeley

^ go to top

People

infobel

411.com

argali
Requires a download but one of the most complete telephone, e-mail, address directories on the net.

White Pages

^ go to top

Omnibus Sites--Useful Facts & Information

Internet Information

Domain Name Services
IANA, Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, provides useful information about generic categories and country codes.

How A Domain Is Activated

Internet Traffic Report

Birth of the Internet

^ go to top

Web Archives

Waybackmachine
Browse through 55 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago.

Internet Archive
The Internet Archive offers permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.

CyberCemetery
The "University of North Texas Libraries and the U.S. Government Printing Office, as part of the Federal Depository Library Program, created a partnership to provide permanent public access to the Web sites and publications of defunct U.S. government agencies and commissions.

^ go to top

Evaluation

Evaluating Web Sites: Criteria and Tools
From Cornell.

Central Ops
Free online network utilities such as "domain dossier" where you can track down the author/sponsor of any website.

Alexa
Paste a Web link/URL into “Site Information” search box to find overview, traffic details, related links, and sites that link to it.

^ go to top

Web Searching Guides and Tutorials

Finding Information on the Web, a Tutorial
This is an outstanding and thorough compilation of resources used for teaching Web searching at UC Berkeley. Includes charts, handouts, exercises, and PowerPoint files.

Bare Bones 101: A Basic Tutorial on Searching the Web
A basic tutorial on how to search the Web. Available in Spanish and English from USC Beaufort.

Internet Detective (for students)
Internet Detective is a free online tutorial designed to help university and college students develop Internet research skills. The tutorial examines the critical thinking process and offers practical advice on evaluating the quality of web sites.

Intute: Virtual Training Suite
A set of free, discipline specific online tutorials designed to help students, lecturers, and researchers improve their Internet information literacy and IT skills. Intute: Virtual Training Suite, a free national gateway from the United Kingdom, selects, catalogs, and delivers high quality Internet resources related to higher education.

NoodleTools
Helps you find the best search strategy for your information need.

Tool Kit for the Expert Web Searcher
From the American Library Association.

Search Engine Showdown
Provides news, reviews, stats, and etc.

Search Engines Chart

Search Engine Watch 
Provides news, reviews, reports, and etc.

Virtual Chase--Key Resources for Web Research
Although the content is intended for legal professionals, it is highly inclusive and useful to academics.

^ go to top

Tips

  1. Use phrase searching for multiple word phrases by enclosing the phrase in quotation marks--Example "War and Peace.”
  2. Use advanced searching mode whenever possible for more precise searching.
  3. Capitalize Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT.
  4. Use the most specific or esoteric words you can think of to describe your search.
  5. Use the command "Control-F" or "Edit > Find in Page" to search for a word within a long Web document.
  6. Understand the difference between domains-- .com, .org., .gov, .edu-- and limit your search to the best domain.
  7. Highlight, cut, and paste to save retyping text or to move text to a new document.
  8. Use + to require a word in your search or – to eliminate a word from your search.
  9. Change the word order or try new words if your search doesn’t bring you the desired results.
  10. Ask a librarian for help or use the Subject Guides from C of C Library home page.
  11. Remember to use library databases which provide authoritative resources.  To identify databases for research, use the library subject guides.

^ go to top

back to subject guides

box top

Related Links

Phone: (843)953.5530 | Fax: (843)953.8019
College of Charleston Libraries | 205 Calhoun Street
Mailing Address: 66 George Street, Charleston, South Carolina, 29424

Last updated Feb 14, 2008 Sheila Seaman and Dongmei Cao, College of Charleston, SC