Internet Search Engines
There are over one trillion Web pages on the Internet 1. Finding the best resources from such a large pool of information can be daunting! To assist you in finding the highest quality information online, use the search engines and Web directories recommended by TC Librarians below. Also visit our Evaluating Web Sites page to learn quick techniques to evaluate information found on the Internet.
ipl2: information you can trust
ipl2 is a search engine created by library and information professionals. Search results include carefully selected Web sites and annotations of their contents. Information is organized by broad subject to allow for topical browsing.
From their Web site: "The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors." Web sites are topically organized, with short summaries of the sites' contents.
Clusty gives you search results that are organized by like topic (clustered). To quote their Web site: "Clusty queries several top search engines, combines the results, and generates an ordered list based on comparative ranking. This 'metasearch' approach helps raise the best results to the top and push search engine spam to the bottom."
The Scout Report contains annotations of and links to the "most valuable online resources" covering every subject imaginable. Students, librarians, academics, and information professionals at the University of Wisconsin-Madison contribute to the Scout Report.
From their Web site: "Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature...[and] helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research." Please visit TC Library's Google Scholar page to learn how best to use this powerful search engine.
1. Alpert, J. & Hajaj, N. (2008, July 25). We knew the web was big.... Retrieved from The Official Google Blog at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html