Search Guide

Searching Help

Finding Information on the Internet - Introduction, browser guides, search strategy, and more.

How To Choose a Search Engine or Directory - Choose by type of search and search method.

Search Engine Showdown - Compares Internet search engines from the searcher's perspective.

Searching the Internet - Tutorial of recommended sites and search techniques.
 

Search Engines

Click on the logo to go to the website.

	About.com is an online neighborhood of hundreds of helpful experts, eager to share their wealth of knowledge with visitors.
	The topical searches aggregate information into highly segmented indexes, helping users refine their searches and quickly access the most pertinent and useful information. Includes a free language translation service with Babel Fish.
	Pose questions in plain English and receive links to Web sites containing relevant information, services and products. Save searches and results.
	Search for free information in 2,500+ Search Engines, Indices, and Directories.
	Microsoft's upgraded and rebranded version of Live Search. Search images, videos, shopping, news, maps and more.
	Clusty is a metasearch site which uses a Clustering Engine to organize the top search results into folders grouping similar items together.
	Dogpile metasearch retrieves the greatest number of relevant results that match your query. Search the Web for images, audio, files, auctions, news, FTP, discussion, and multimedia.
	Simple search and advanced search by what?, where?, and when?  Shortcuts can be added to personalize it.
	Search for Web pages, images, maps, news, and Usenet discussion forums.  Also has the Google Web Directory organized by subject.
	IxQuick is a metasearch site.  It was created keeping researchers, educators, historians, librarians, scholars, students and the world's scientific, literary and media community in mind.  Also in Dansk, Deutsch, English UK, Español, Français, Italiano, Nederlands, Norsk, Polski, Português, Suomi, Svenska, Türkçe.
	Meta-search engine for Google and MSN, with preview and clustered results by topics, sources, and URLs.
	The Librarians' Internet Index (LII) is a searchable, annotated subject directory of over 20,000 entries maintained by librarians and organized into 14 main topics and nearly 300 related topics.
	Mahalo is a human-powered search engine that creates organized, comprehensive, and spam free search results for the most popular search terms.
	A "smart meta search engine" which simultaneously queries a series of search engines.
	MetaCrawler metasearch technology searches the Internet's top search engines, including Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN Search, Ask.com, About.com, and more.
	Search tools and directory of sites to check the truth to rumors, urban legends, virus warnings, and scams.
	RefSeek is a government and academic search engine that searches more than one billion documents, including web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals, and newspapers.
	Scirus concentrates on scientific content only and searches both web and journal sources.
	Search once for results from over 1,000 search engines, Web directories, auctions, storefronts, news sources, discussion groups, reference sites, and more.
	WebCrawler provides search results from Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live, Ask and others. It also provides images, audio, video, news, and local information.
	An online guide to the World Wide Web created by a staff of editors who visit and evaluate web sites, and then organize them into subject-based categories and sub-categories. Also Yahoo! Telemundo.

Image Search Engines

	Finds pictures anywhere on the Web. AltaVista also stores information about the visual qualities of images, so it can display a list of images "similar to" a given image.  Includes a "Family Filter".
	Ditto Visual Search is a fun, fast, intuitive way to search the Internet.
	Also try the Advanced Image Search.
	Microsoft's replacement for MSN Search.  Refine search results by size, aspect ratio, color, style, and face.
	Search photos and illustrations by format, colorization, and size.

Kids' Search Engines

	Ask for Kids is a fast, easy and kid-friendly way for kids to find answers to their questions online. It uses natural-language technology that allows kids to ask questions in the same way they would ask a parent, friend or teacher.
	KidsClick! was created by a group of librarians to guide young users to valuable and age appropriate web sites.
	Kids.gov provides links to Federal kids' sites along with some of the best kids' sites from other organizations all grouped by subject.
	Yahoo! Kids is a browsable, searchable directory of Internet sites for kids. Each site has been carefully checked by an experienced educator to ensure the content and links are appropriate for kids aged 7-12.  Also Japan and Korea.

Computational Knowledge Engines

WolframAlpha is a computational knowledge engine: it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links. For more about the WolframAlpha engine, check out this excellent video.