Internet Search: Subject Directories, Search Engines, & More

Introduction -- You can find information on the Internet by using one or more of the many available subject directories and search engines listed below. But watch out! All subject directories and search engines are not equal. Which one works best will vary depending on the nature of the particular information you need. One that works well on one search may work very poorly on another. To improve your search results, learn more about subject directories and search engines.

Anyone can "publish" on the Web, no matter how qualified, how ignorant, or how biased they might be. Therefore, the the information found varies from bogus to scholarly. Be wary of what you find and improve the quality of the sources you use by learning more about evaluating materials on the Internet.

Subject Directories -- provide a good place to start when searching for information about broad topics or when browsing the Internet because the sites included are selected by people rather than by search engine "robots." 

• To learn more, read about subject directories. 

    Links to some of the better subject directories:

		General subject directories -- less selective
About.com		http://www.about.com/
CompletePlanet		http://aip.completeplanet.com -- Directory of the deep web. "A comprehensive listing of dynamic searchable databases. Find databases with highly relevant documents that cannot be crawled or indexed by surface web search engines."
Open Directory Project		http://www.dmoz.org --The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.
Yahoo directory    or Yahoo  home		http://dir.yahoo.com/ --  The Yahoo directory has been the best-known & largest human-compiled  directory of the Web.  However, the search on the Yahoo home page (www.yahoo.com) no longer searches the Yahoo directory but instead is a Google search of the Web. To get to the human-compiled categories, go to the Yahoo Directory link.
Google directory		http://www.google.com/dirhp -- Google's directory is based on the Open Directory project
		General subject directories -- more selective
BUBL		http://www.bubl.ac.uk/link/  --  Internet resources covering all academic subject areas are selected, evaluated, catalogued and described. Links are checked and fixed each month.
Internet Public Library		http://www.ipl.org/ -- search or browse Internet resources covering all subject areas. Primarily selected by librarians and library science graduate students.
Librarians' Internet Index		http://lii.org/ -- human-compiled; Internet resources selected and evaluated by librarians for their usefulness to users of public libraries
Scout Report		http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/archives/ -- search or browse the "archives" of selected and reviewed web sites chosen by the editorial board of Scout Report
		Academic/scholarly subject directories
Infomine		http://infomine.ucr.edu/ -- scholarly web sites
Intute		http://www.intute.ac.uk/ -- Intute (Formerly RDN:Resource Discovery Network) is the UK’s free national gateway to Internet resources for the learning, teaching and research community. The service  links to  resources via a series of subject-based information gateways (or hubs).  Intute gathers resources which are carefully selected by subject specialists in partner institutions.

Search engines -- allow you to search for keywords in order to find information on narrow topics and to find the web pages of specific organizations, agencies, or people.

• To learn more about using search engines effectively, read about search engines.  
• To learn more about the search engines listed above, read Greg Notess' Search Engine Showdown. Note the Features Chart,  a summary table showing which search techniques can be used in the major search engines
• For search engine news, use Pandia Search Engine Detective to search the top search engine blogs, discussion lists, news sites, etc.

Links to some of the better Search Engines:

		Question Answering engines.   These search engines are designed to answer questions presented in natural language
	BrainBoost	http://www.brainboost.com/ -- Finds answers to your questions posed in plain English (e.g., Where is Iraq? How many calories are in a cheeseburger?)

Meta search tools -- allow you to search more than one search engine at a time. 

• While metasearch may save you from selecting a specific search engine, metasearching also has important disadvantages. 
• To learn more about metacrawlers, read UC Berkeley Library's Meta-Search Engines.  They "recommend directly searching each search engine and recommend AGAINST using meta-searchers."

    Links to some of the meta search tools:

New tools for fighting information overload using using visual methods for displaying results, categorizing results, etc..

Tools for finding today's news 

Tools for finding people and businesses -- allow you to do find one or more of the following about people or businesses: e-mail addresses, phone numbers, mailing addresses, and additional information.

• Search engines often include "Yellow Pages" to search for businesses and a "people search" to search for individuals.

   Link to one of these:

Find reviews of web sites.  Newsletters and journals that review web sites are listed below.  See also the section above on "Subject Directories that rate and review sites."  Newsletters usually have a search option and/or an archive of back issues to locate the reviews.

Evaluating Internet sources -- is necessary when using the Web for research, because no one is controlling the quality of the material placed there. Although a list of search results can be retrieved quickly with a search engine, sorting the good from the bad, the current from the out-of-date, the bogus from the reliable, the scholarly from the popular, and the biased from the objective can take considerable time. To learn to evaluate Internet sources:

• First, read Evaluating Materials on the Internet.
• For additional help, read "Evaluation Criteria" (by Susan Beck, New Mexico State University), Evaluating Internet Research Sources (by Robert Harris, Southern California College), and Evaluating Web Resources (by Jan Alexander & Marsha Ann Tate, Widener University).
• Then visit Consumer WebWatch -- to learn about their five guidelines for websites that want to establish credibility with consumers: http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/bestpractices/index.html  

Finding Good Sites For Kids -- is important in the "Wild West" environment of the web. For more information on safety issues, see:  Child Safety on the Information Highway , and Parents Guide to Internet Safety. For help finding good sites, try the following....

     SDLA Surftips -- "up-to-date resource on Internet Safety, family-safe Internet sites, safe sites for kids and teens, and links to legal information related to the Online Privacy Act as well as Internet protection." Provided by the South Dakota Library Association.

     Great Web Sites for Kids -- compiled by the Children and Technology Committee of the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association.

    See also, Search Engine Watch's Kids Search Engines