Search engines for specific types of information
Audio and video
Blinkx
Searches TV shows and movies.
TRILT (Television and Radio Index for Learning and Teaching)
Radio and television programme index from the British Universities Film and Video Council. It contains complete listings of schedules since 2001 for over 330 channels. New data is uploaded at least five days before transmission. You will need your Cardiff University network username and password to access this service.
Blogs and RSS feeds
Weblogs or blogs are short web based postings which are usually listed in chronological order. Good blogs are updated regularly by the blog owner. They are often diaries or information updates focused on a particular topic so they can be useful for keeping your research up to date. Beware that anyone can set up and run a blog and so you will need to make sure the information provided is accurate.
RSS feeds provide subscribers with regular updates of newly added content to web sites including online journals, news sites and blogs. RSS feeds are often free but a reader is required to view them. You can view RSS feeds in the My RSS portlet within Cardiff Portal. More information is available on the Cardiff Portal help web pages.
Here is a selection of blog search engines:
AllPlus
Click on the Blogs tab above the search box.
Bloglines
Provides a free RSS feed reader service following a brief registration process. You can search Bloglines for a range of blogs or add your own selections.
Browsys Power Search
Select the Blogs or Twitter tabs.
Google Blogs
Trovando.it
Click on the Blogs tab.
Books, journals and conference papers
The following services aim to only search for scholarly information such as journal articles and conference proceedings. However, they should be considered complementary to rather than substitutes for the bibliographic databases for your subject.
BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine)
Google Books
Shows snippets of books which match your search term. In some cases it is possible to view sample pages or even the whole book depending on whether the publisher or author has given permission or the book is out of copyright.
Google Scholar
Searches for scholarly information on the Internet such as journal articles.
Video: How to get the best from Google Scholar - 5 top tips
Video: How to access journals from off-campus using Google Scholar
Refseek
A search engine currently in its testing phase, Refseek aims to retrieve academic information. It searches web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals and newspapers.
Scirus
Elsevier's search engine for scientific, technical and medical information.
Files
Slideshare
Useful for tracing PowerPoint presentations, videos and Word or PDF documents.
Images
British Library
Images from the British Library's extensive print and photo collections. Useful for 'historical' images.
Flickr
Photo sharing web site. Others include Photobucket and Photobox.
morgueFile
Images are freely contributed but you must abide by the morgueFile terms of use for each image.
Maps
News
Chipwrapper
Searches a range of UK broadsheet and tabloid online newspapers.
NewsNow
UK News Portal.