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Search Engines
These large, general, full-text search engines can be used when you're looking for information on any topic. Because these search engines gather information from different places and often have different results, you might want to try all five (or a meta-search engine) if you're looking for all the information on a given topic. Many of these search engines also provide other services — local telephone and address directories, shopping sites, maps, travel information, recent news, image searching, and more.
Ask.com | Advanced | Images | News
Ask.com suggests topics that may be related to your search – on the right side of the screen, you'll see ways to narrow and expand your search, or look for things related to your subject. Click on the binoculars icon to see previews of webpages in your results list.
Exalead provides an site preview image to the left of each of your results, and gives you tips for better searching in the upper right corner. Exalead suggests different search terms that you can add and subtract while you're looking at the list of results, and allows you to narrow your search by file format (audio, PDF, etc.), to webpages from specific countries or in a certain language.
Google | Advanced | Images | News | Special Searches
Google is a favorite of many searchers because its page ranking system places the most desired results of each search at the top of the page. Google also maintains its own copy (the "cached" version) of most pages, so if the current links don't work you can still read the information.
MSN Portal | Live Search | Images | News
MSN Live Search features "natural language" searching built right in. This means that if you type in a simple question, like "How tall is the Sears Tower?," Live Search will give you the answer at the top of the results screen. Most of these answers are drawn from the Encarta Encyclopedia.
Yahoo Portal | Yahoo Search | Advanced | Images | News | Creative Commons
Yahoo's search brings up websites, images, shopping possibilities and takes you to any Yahoo directory sites related to your topic. Like the above engines, Yahoo now looks for your topic in blogs, too. Yahoo also maintains a copy ("cached" version) of most pages, so if links don't work you can still read the information.
Meta-search Engines
Meta-search engines allow you to do your search in many search engines at once.
With a meta-search engine, you can take advantage of several tools in one step!
Clusty | Advanced | Images | News | Blogs
Clusty's Clustering Engine organizes search engine results from any of dozens of searchable repositories, including the results from several big search engines. Customize your search as you go: results appear arranged by subject for easy navigation.
Dogpile | Advanced | News | Audio | Video
Dogpile searches more than ten search engines at once. Results are displayed by relevancy, but if you want to see the top results from different search engines compared, you can click on the orange buttons at the top of the results screen. This is a great way to see how differently the big search engines work.
Metacrawler | Advanced | News | Audio | Video
Metacrawler searches more than ten search engines at once. Try their popular IntelliFinder feature - it predicts what kind of information you are looking for based on the overall popularity of the keyword(s), tries to find matches with things like movie titles, musician names or seasonal items, then recommends matching content.
Zapmeta also delivers search results by relevancy. Click on the "Quick View" option next to each search result and the webpage will open up right there in your results list. Or, click on the "Result Snapshot" feature at the top of the results screen, and a small image of each webpage will appear in the results list.
Subject Directories
Directories work like a phone book; they list websites by topic. They are created by public libraries, academic libraries, individuals and commercial companies.
Websites are selected and featured by expert "Guides" whose pictures, qualifications and e-mail addresses are readily available. Very comprehensive and user friendly.
A directory produced by Drexel University's College of Information Science & Technology.
Librarians' Index to the Internet
Search and browse over 20,000 entries organized into 14 main topics and nearly 300 related topics, all added and maintained by librarians! This directory is unusual in that it catalogs each website with Library of Congress Subject Headings (the same system used by most libraries for their online public access catalogs).
Open Directory Project | Kids and Teens
A large, comprehensive subject directory built and maintained by volunteer subject specialists from around the globe. Features a special collection for kids and teens.
Yahoo has been a leader in organizing Web information and categorizing thousands of websites.
Links for Kids & Teens
Check out our cool collection of fun and educational links just for kids!
Links to helpful sites about careers, college planning, health, and teen issues.
Links to fun sites with information on comics and art, TV and movies, music, sports, video and computer games, and weird stuff.
Check out our list of great resources on the internet, as well as guides to using our very own research tools from the library on your computer.
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