General Search Engines
Search engines are powerful tools but the number of results they retrieve can be overwhelming and many may not be appropriate for academic work. The Information Resources by Subject pages include the relevant databases, journals, Internet resources and search tools for your subject.
- How search engines work
- Major world-wide search engines
- Country specific search engines
- Meta search engines
How search engines work
Search engines allow you to enter keywords that are run against a database of billions of web documents, usually created automatically by "spiders" or "robots". Most search engines rank search results by relevancy; usually how often and where your search terms appear. Google also ranks results according to the number of other sites which link to a page.
No search engine covers the entire Internet. If you are doing a comprehensive search, it is important to use more than just one search engine as you can get widely differing results from different search engines. Check the search tips for each one to see how to get the best from it. The advanced search facilities provided can also help you make your searches more precise.
Most search engines do little to monitor the quality of the pages they retrieve. See the Internet tutorials for further help with using the Internet and evaluating the quality of web pages.
Major world-wide search engines
Below are some of the major search engines, most offer additional news, audio, images and video searching:
Alltheweb
Ask.com
Suggests search terms as you type.
Bing
Microsoft's search engine. Suggests search terms as you type and offers related search terms in your search results.
Exalead
This search engine allows phonetic and approximate spelling searching which is useful if you are unsure of the spelling of your search terms. It also shows thumbnail images of web pages in the results.
Excite
Search engine and web directory.
Google
Popular for its speed, relevance of results and uncluttered interface.
Country specific search engines
These search engines only cover UK web sites:
These are sources of other country specific search engines:
Country based search engines
List produced by Internet expert Phil Bradley.
Meta Search Engines
Meta search engines allow you to search with several search engines simultaneously. They include:
Browsys Power Search
Formerly known as Intelways, this search engine allows you to select which search engines you want to search. There is an Academic category which searches scholarly search engines such as Google Scholar, Scirus and Citeseer.
Ixquick
Offers searching in 18 languages.
TripleMe
Searches Google, MSN and Yahoo simultaneously and then displays the results from all three to aid easy comparison.
Trovando.it
Enter your keywords and choose which search engines you want to search. No need to find and re-enter your search terms in every search engine.