Search Tools There is no single place to look for things on the Internet like the library catalog. Instead there are different types of tools for finding resources.
	Subject Directories Librarians' Index to the Internet | Yahoo | Internet Public Library Search Engines Google | Northern Light | Fast Search | Alta Vista Meta Search Engines Ixquick | Metacrawler | ProFusion   SEFLIN's Virtual Library MyLibraryService.org

Subject Directories

Subject directories are web indexes created by people who may or may not be selective. They are organized by subjects or categories, and they may have a site search engine that searches the index. Small, selective subject directories are a good starting place.

 

Librarians' Index to the Internet
www.lii.org

This is a very selective directory that will give you relatively small numbers of high qualtiy resources with annotations.

Yahoo
www.yahoo.com

This is the best known subject directory. It's very large and not selective, but it is easy to use.

Internet Public Library
www.ipl.org

This virtual public library was started by library school students at the University of Michigan. It catalogs electronic resources.

Back to the top of this page

Search engines are web indexes created by software. The robot-like software finds resources and indexes them in various ways. No one search engine indexes the whole Web. They vary in size and use different methods of ranking results. Using search engines:

• requires more search skills
• may return huge numbers of resources
• you are on your own to evaluate the resources you find

Google
www.google.com

Large index that uses popularity to rank relevance.

Northern Light
www.northernlight.com

Large database that includes Special Collections documents (summaries and citations free, full-text fee-based). Custom Folders can be very helpful in narrowing searches.

Fast Search
www.alltheweb.com

Large index that performs well for simple and precision searching.

Alta Vista
www.altavista.com

Large index. Advanced Search allows powerful queries with Boolean logic.

Back to the top of this page

Meta search engines submit your search to multiple search engines. Use them when you are having problems finding resources or if you are doing comprehensive research.

Ixquick
www.ixquick.com

Translates your search into the appropriate syntax for each search engine and aggregates the top ten from each, removing duplicates.

Metacrawler
www.metacrawler.com

Excellent multi-threaded Web Search Service. Sends your queries to several Web search engines,including Lycos, Infoseek, WebCrawler, Excite, AltaVista, and Yahoo, and searches all of them at once.

ProFusion
www.profusion.com

Customizable search with optional topic searches to help target results.

Back to the top of this page

Back to the top of this page