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Searching the Web

The Web is full of valuable information. However, finding what you need can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Furthermore, it can be hard to evaluate the information you find as a worthy scholarly source. Below are tools for searching the internet for various types of information. You may also look at our Critical Evaluation of Information Services guide for tips on how to judge the sites that you find. And don't forget, it can be much more efficient to use our general and discipline-specific subscription databases. That said, below are tools that you can use to search the Web for various types of information:

Open Access Scholarly Research

What is Open Access?
Open Access publishing is a document that is provided free to all users online. These materials, while freely available, are still under copyright laws, varying by author, publisher, etc. An example of an open access site is an institutional repository, such as UO's Scholars' Bank, a digital archive for the scholarly output of the University.

Why use Open Access materials?
When conducting academic research online, it is important to have tools to find authoritative, scholarly resources; given that anyone can post a website on any topic, this can be a challenge. The below search engines are just some of the tools that you can use to find scholarly, peer-reviewed, refereed materials freely available online. For more discipline-specific online resources, check out the lists of web resources on our subject guides.

  • OAIster - OAIster is a project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service. Their goal is to create a collection of freely available, previously difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources, in various formats, that are easily searchable by anyone. Most of these resources are housed in institutional respositories at universities from around the world. You can search all 363 institutions together or individually.
  • PolySearch Engine - PolySearch Engines allow you to run simple queries across several open access ready reference databases or publishers' abstract archives in one fell swoop. Created by Peter Jasco, this site asks you to select the reference sources that you'd like to search. This is especially convenient for corroborating information in different dictionaries, and encyclopedias, and for comprehensive literature searches.
  • Directory of Open Access Journals - DOAJ covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. There are now 1379 journals in the directory. Currently 342 journals are searchable on article level. As of today 61699 articles are included in the DOAJ service.
  • Though not a search tool, the Institution Archives Registry, a directory of over 400 open access archives around the world, is useful in terms of getting a snapshot of the current state of the open access movement and seeing what's out there.

Scholarly Search Engines

  • Google Scholar(beta) - Still in it's beta testing phase, Google Scholar is such a big deal that there's an entire blog devoted to the new search engine. To access Google Scholar, use this link: http://scholar.google.com/schhp?inst=uoregon.edu, so Google knows that you are affiliated with UO and, therefore, have access to certain subscription sites. Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Google Scholar is a good supplement to our databases, rather than a replacement. It has been criticized because it's coverage is very inconsistent, even within individual journals. Also, much content located in institutional repositories is not caught by Google Scholar yet.
  • Many of our subject guides include links to websites that can help you find discipline-specific information on the internet.

 

Standard search engines

  • Google - fast results and high relevance; offers separate government documents search engine. Use the Google Cheat Sheet or our library's Google Searching Basics to build more powerful searches.
  • Clusty - groups together similar results (e.g. search for "pearl" and you will get results organized into folders for "pearl harbor," "pearl jam," "steinbeck novel," "daniel pearl," etc.). this organization of results help you narrow down to the more relevant information.
  • AlltheWeb - fast results and one of the biggest index of the Web
  • Altavista - one of the largest search engines with strong international coverage; translates between English and five European languages
  • Mooter - groups results into clusters or themes based on how frequently the search words and the cluster name appear on each page
  • MSN - popular search engine; blend of human-powered directory information and computer generated coverage different from many other engines
  • Ask.com - a fast-growing search engine; offers ways to refine or improve your search, and links to resources or experts on your topic.
  • Yahoo - the best known subject directory.  

Meta search engines

Meta search engines search multiple search engines simultaneously. Each meta search engine sends your search to several search engines, which will return varying results. Meta search engines can be useful for simple searching on a unique term or phrase but have limited advanced searching capabilities.

  • Dogpile - one of the most popular meta search engines; searches 3 search engines, with option to search others
  • Ixquick - searches 14 search engines to provide fast results; uses stars to indicate each site's relevance
  • Query Server - offers a web search covering 10 search engines, plus focused searching for news, health, financial, and government information
  • Vivisimo - searches 9 search engines, plus optional news search engines; results are grouped into folders for quick access
  • All Search Engines - This is more of a search engine aggregator, rather than a metasearcher. It is an up-to-date list of the search engines that are out there, including search engines that just search in a particular topic (business, people, government, etc.)

Deep Web search tools

The deep web or invisible web refers to the substantial part of the World Wide Web which traditional search engines don't index. A great deal of potentially valuable information may be found in dynamically driven databases that are inaccessible to standard search engines.

  • Complete Planet - Provides access to thousands of deep web databases by broad subject area, LexiBot software available for direct searching of deep web content
  • INFOMINE - a virtual library of Internet resources selected by librarians including databases, electronic journals, electronic books, bulletin boards, listservs, online library card catalogs, articles and directories of researchers, appropriate for the academic community

Multimedia (Audio, Images, Video)

[Some search engines offer special features to search only for image or audio files]

  • Altavista - One of the first to offer image searching; searches can be limited to photos, graphics, color, and/or black and white images. Audio and video searching is also available.
  • Google - Google's Image Search feature is an easy, comprehensive way of searching for images.
  • Hotbot - Hotbot's Advanced Search feature offers many options for limiting your search to pages that include image, audio, and video files.
  • Blinkx.com is a search tool that you can use to search for podcasts and video.

For additional information

Consult our sources:

Maintained by: John Russell, johnruss@uoregon.edu
Last Modified: 02/07/2007