Search Engines, Metasearch engines, and Directories (and a little more).

Search Engines:

www.google.com : Everyone uses Google, but often not very efficiently. Sure there are those tabs across the top, and most have used at least the images search. But at the end of that bar is says more. Try pressing that button. You will see a list of services, tools and downloads. For instance, scholar.google.com allows you to narrow your search to scholarly sides. That eliminates many unwanted hits.

http://www.ask.com This search engine is a combination of DirectHit and Teoma. It identifies sites that are most popular among the experts in that field. It then clusters your results under various subheadings, and offers suggestions to narrow or broaden your search, as well as providing related terms. This search engine retired Ask Jeeves.

www.alltheweb.com : Works in conjunction with Yahoo. Especially good for catching plagiarism. Put suspicious line in quotation marks. Searches include PDF and word documents. Search in 36 different languages.

www.exalead.com : Desktop search engine that lets you personalize your searches. You can download a free version or pay for a professional version. Includes a user guide and allows you to narrow your search by format. Includes brief annotation.

http://A9.com : Especially designed for searching e-commerce sites. Linked with Amazon.comstreet and shows street level photos of addresses, used for local search, mapping and driving directions. Especially useful to see what the street looks like when you are driving alone.

http://www.searchedu.com/: Search only academic sites, part of Google. Has convenient Reference Links. Calculators, Constants, and Conversions.

Scientific Search Engines:

http://www.scirus.com/ Searches science sites

http://www.scientific-search-engines.com/ This site bookmarks top educational sites and includes all academic subject areas. Also gives open access journals.

http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/MathSearch.html This is a math search engine.

Clustering Tools/MetaSearching:

http://clusty.com : An offshoot of Vivisimo.com. It returns results from many sources with one query and organizes them into hierarchical clusters. Tabs allow you to narrow your search. Uses many search tools, and eliminates duplicates.

http://Kartoo.com : Metasearch engine with visual interface. If you move the curser over different parts of the map, results list will illuminate to narrow your choices.

http://grokker.com : Another visual mapping of results. You can email the map.

http://ixquick.com : Metasearch engine that rates the site according to how many search engines choose the site. Also has an international phone directory and lowest price finder for shopping.

http://zapmeta.com : Along with web search, it offer a directory based on data from The Open Directory Project and Product Search powered by Pricegrabber.