Search Engines!

On this page you'll find some popular search engines for research, as well as names, addresses, and newsgroups. Searchable pages on the internet are increasing exponentially. In the fall of 2005, Google announced that it was tripling the number of searchable pages, which it had previously counted at 8 billion. In contrast, Yahoo claims to search 19 million pages.

GOOGLE

Download the Google toolbar.

Go here for a Google facelift.

Use Google Web, Google Images, Google Groups and Google News. Customize your Google news.

Use Google notebook for research: web browse and clip sections from webpages and mark their URLs in a google notebook you can keep private or share with others.

Google allows you to read a webpage in your native language, search pages in a given country or language, whether it be Hungarian, Icelandic or Yoruba; and to translate it. Go here to try it.

Add Google Gadgets—from NPR to latest news to Wikipedia.

If you feeling like reading google news in a foreign language, google offers seven as of this date: Argentina, Chile, French Canadian, Mexico, Austria, Switzerland (French), Switzerland (German). Google expects to launch many more over the coming years.

Download Google Desktop, and let google index your entire computer. Then when looking for a document or email you can find it almost instantly on your computer. Google will put a desktop icon on your taskbar. You can also access a desktop search via the regular google searchpage.

Try Google Scholar. It’s relatively new, but it archives scholarly articles on a subject, and gives you results where you can access free copies of the articles on the web.

Try Soople to use Google many different ways.

Here’s Google Advanced Search.

If you want help searching, try Google Suggest, which will offer a dropdown menu as you start to write a search term.

If you want to donate your computer’s idle time to advancing scientific knowledge, try Google Compute.

If you want google to help you define a term, use Google Search: define

If you want to limit your search by location, use Google Local.

Some of the above are in beta mode right now. If you want to know what else Google is inventing, go to Google Labs.

To customize your Google search (# of items per page, languages, blocking explicit content) go here.

BUILDING GOOGLE QUERIES

v Google queries are not case sensitive. You can use upper or lower case and Google won’t care.

v Google’s wildcard is an asterisk * and you put it in to represent a word in a search phrase. But adding in an asterisk at the beginning or end of a word will not change Google’s search.

v Google is intelligent, and sometimes expands a search based on other versions of a word. For example, if you use the word “dietary” in a search, Google may also look for the word “diet” for you. This is called stemming.

v Google ignores common words such as who, where, what, the, a, and an.

v To make sure Google is not ignoring a word, put the phrase containing it in quotation marks, which submits your search as a single unit, a phrase. Or precede the word with a plus sign (+).

v Google limits your search terms to ten words. But it does not count the wildcard * as a search term. Sometimes you can substitute the * for a word that might not be that important, and Google will allow you more words than it would have.

v Suppose you have a general search, such as “student” but you don’t want a zillion answers from Google. By adding words with a minus in front of them, you can eliminate search terms. “student –new york” would mean you did not get webpages that give you information about new york students.

v You can ask Google to locate a word within the text of a document. This search: student intext:new york tells Google, “Find me webpages that have student in the text document, but only the pages that also have new york in the text document.”

v Bookmarking a Google URL is a useful way to not only highlight a page you want to revisit, but it allows you to search again by changing terms. Let’s say you arrived at a good advanced query that got you to a useful page: “www.google.com/search?q=student –new york”. You can bookmark it, call it up later and change it: “www.google.com/search?q+student -california”. I’ve never actually felt the need to do this, but its useful information.

v Here, from the scary and fascinating book: GOOGLE HACKING, by Johnny Long, is a hacker’s webpage: http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/. I have no idea what it means or what to do with it!

v Click on “cached” to get an outdated webpage from Google, or to get a page with your search terms highlighted for easy scrolling/viewing to what you want.

v Right click to open your search result/link in a new window if you want to keep your original search page up on your desktop.

Use FaganFinder, a Google interface. Also try FaganFinder reference (which includes thesaurus, dictionary, translater).

VIVISIMO Not only is this search engine very good in science, it categorizes answers and allows you the option of viewing a webpage as a new window, in the current window, or in preview form. The latter is very useful if you are quickly skimming many results. In addition, instead of a sequential list of hits based on relevancy, the Vivísimo engine generates clusters of documents based on theme. Open a cluster, and you see a group of documents that not only reflect your search criteria, but also relate to each other. This approach gives you lots of at-a-glance contextual information about your results, making Vivisimo's search experience more intuitive and useful than most.

The Memory Hole: More than science, this site contains “lost” or “suppressed” information from 9/11 dispatch tapes to OSHA’s illness database, reports on chemical weaons, films about spy satellites and more.

Widgets: For ease of use and information at a glance, download Konfabulator. You can put “widgets” on your desktop that float, choose their colors and transparency. Everything from an analog clock to the weather, a little google searchbar, rss feeds and more.

The Invisible Web & The Time Machine

Vast expanses of the Web are invisible to search engines. The Invisible Web is made up of information stored in databases. Unlike pages on the visible Web, information in databases is generally inaccessible to the software spiders and crawlers that compile search engine indexes.

Search engine spiders are the map makers of the Web. They roam freely through most Web servers, recording the addresses of Web pages they discover. When they come across a database, though, it's as if they've run smack into the entrance of a massive library with securely bolted doors. Spiders can record the library's address, but can tell you nothing about the books, magazines or other documents it contains.

Fortunately, there are guides to the thousands of databases that make up the Invisible Web. Here's how to boldly go where no search engine has gone before. To read more about the invisible web, visit Berkeley’s site.

Links to the Invisible Web:

Bright Planet BrightPlanet says it has uncovered the Deep-Web – a vast reservoir of Internet content that is 500 times larger than the known "surface" World Wide Web. The Deep-Web contains billions of high-quality documents in about 350,000 specialty databases -- all hidden from view from standard search engines.

Infomine (academic search engine)

Invisible-Web I’ve linked to the science category here. You will also find social science, health and medicine, reference and more, as well as many sub-categories. This site is a companion to The Invisible Web: Finding Hidden Internet Resources Search Engines Can't See by Chris Sherman and Gary Price. It includes a directory of some of the best resources the Invisible Web has to offer. The directory includes resources that are informative, of high quality, and contain worthy information from reliable information providers that are not visible to general-purpose search engines.

TIME MACHINES…I use this one a lot and it is extremely useful. Go to WayBackMachine and you can browse web pages archived since 1996, like snapshots taken of the past. This is a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form.You can get information that has since been lost, because pages have been updated, or because Google’s cache has not stored it. Check out Amazon and Yahoo when they first put their shingles up on the internet, and have a good laugh. Here, for instance, was Yahoo on October 17, 1996. This site can help you in finding information on older webpages long gone, especially for profiles.

SNAIL AND EMAIL ADDYs and PHONE Numbers

MESA, MetaEmailSearchAgent The largest email address book worldwide. allows you to submit a single query to multiple search engines, including Bigfoot, DejaNews, Four11, IAF, Infospace, Swissinfo, and suchen.de.

555-1212 is a large phone directory.

WHOWHERE offers eight million listings and gives real addresses and phone numbers.

Yahoo People Finder is another good search engine.

Internet Address Finder has nearly seven million listings.

Switchboard helps you find people, businesses, and maps.

Bigfoot for addresses and phone numbers.
Yup, that's Bigfoot. But click on it for a link to a fun site.

White Pages for:

France
Finland
Germany
Italy
Australia