Clearinghouse - Ready Reference Resources

Clearinghouse of Professional Information

Search Tools

This section is a listing of links to sites providing information on Internet searching as well as links to various types of Internet search tools, and databases themselves. This section is also maintained as a support for EXCEL courses, especially the on-line "Electronic Sources of Information". Students can use this selection of links to complete their assignments.

	indicates an item written by SOLS staff		indicates an item written by OLS-North staff
Clicking on certain topics will open a new window, if the link is to a topic included in an other Clearinghouse page

General Resources

About Web Searching

How to Search the Net Effectively (Media Awareness Network)
Search Engine by Search Features By librarian G.R. Notess - organized comparison charts, reviews, search strategies, etc. (updated in March 2008)
Search the Internet and find websites (University of California. Berkeley Library). A real find! Groups search engines in a table, including search text box for each, as well as search tips for many general and advanced search engines.
Web Search Guide. Tutorials These tutorials were once part of The Internet Guide available through subscription.

Specialized Resources

A Canadian Approach

Canadian Information by Subject (NL) / Information sur le Canada par matière (BN)
Yahoo! Canada Features more than 12,000 sites of relevance to Canadians in addition to offering the full Yahoo! database of listings.

Directories

Environment Directory: world's biggest environment search engine
Le Fouineux Excellent search engine portal and directory in French
Google Web Directory No frills and fast!
The Internet Public Library (University of Michigan)
La Toile du Québec
Librarian's Index to the Internet. Websites you can trust (Berkeley Public Library)

On-line Databases

Educator's Reference Desk "You can access AskERIC's 2,000+ lesson plans, 3,000+ links to online education information, and 200+ question archive responses. The Educator's Reference Desk provides a search interface to the ERIC Database, providing access to over one million bibliographic records on educational research, theory, and practice.
FindArticles is a free resource for articles searches.

Search Engines

Answers an innovative way to find answers on the Web, without searching for them. Instead of going to your favorite search engine and typing in a query, then sorting through various links to find the answer that you are looking for, Answers.com "displays quick, snapshot answers with concise, reliable information."
Ask Replaces Ask Jeeves and searches the Teoma database of web pages. (Teoma discontinued March 2006.) Full text of web pages (over 2 billion).
Clusty Optimized for mobile devices
Cuil Claims to be the world’s biggest search engine. ”Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.”
Exalead is a good general purpose search engine, with lots of interesting features such as a personalized home page, filetype search, and individual site thumbnails available in search results. See About.com review of Exalead
Google! No frills and fast. Shows the most relevant pages first. Google Search Engine Cheat Sheet
KartOO A visual meta search engine
Live Search (Microsoft)

"Deep or Invisible Web" search engines

The “deep” or “invisible” web are web pages not immediately found in search engines. Usually, these resources are located in databases or are otherwise excluded from conventional searches.

The Invisible Web - Find Out More About The Deep Web - Deep Web Search (Ask.com)
.PDF Search Engine

"Image" Search Engines

Picsearch Picsearch connects its users to the vast visual resources of the internet. Picsearch uses its own technology to crawl the web and has created a searchable index of images. Picsearch has a family friendliness that allows children to surf in safety as all offensive material is filtered out by our advanced filtering systems
Google Image Search
Directory of Image Search Engines (Big Search Engine Index)

Meta search engines

Metasearches send a single query to multiple databases simultaneously.

All+ A metasearch engine, which searches across several other major search engines.
Dogpile: Metasearch searches multiple engines - this means that instead of getting the best results one search engine has to offer, you'll be getting the best combined results from a variety of engines, and not just any engines, but industry leading engines like Google, Yahoo! Search, Live Search, Ask.com, About, MIVA, LookSmart and more.
Ixquick: Searches the 14 largest engines. Ranks results. Use this engine when you are searching for an obscure topic or an individual site. "Librarians love it!"
Mamma: Mother of All Search EnginesInterface also in French to search the 'francophonie' or the world

'Real Time' Search Engine

Collecta Monitors the update streams of news sites, popular blogs and social media, and Flickr, so we can show you results as they happen. From web designers at AOL
CrowdEyeCrowdEye is a new generation of search engine which looks at the worldwide web in a new way. By tracking discussions on Twitter, we can help our users find out what’s important to them right now in real time. CrowdEye has created innovative technology to scan through tweets, retweets, twitter links and more. We then provide you with powerful yet easy ways to slice, dice, summarize and categorize the data to answer your questions. Whether you’re interested in following your brand, baseball, celebrities, movies, or anything else people are talking about

Specialized Search Engines

Berit's Best Sites for Children
Health and Medical Search Engines Link to sites selected by SOLS on this topic.
KidsClick Web search for kids by librarians. Includes a directory version with Dewey classes
MagPortal Helps you find individual magazine articles on the web. Use the search engine or click on a category to browse through article listings from many free magazines.
Top Ten Job Search Engines
SlideFinder A search tool to find publicly available PowerPoint slidesets
Whostalkin A social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations surrounding the topics that they care about most. Whether it be your favorite sport, favorite food, celebrity, or your
company’s brand name; Whostalkin.com can help you join in on the conversations that you care about most.

Vortals / Portals

Vortals are web sites which focus on particular topics and which especially allow you to search for information relating to those topics. They include specialty search engines, link lists in Yahoo-style directory search categories.

CrossDaily.com Links to Christian search engines and resources.
Direct Search (by Gary Price of Resource Shelf). A growing compilation of links to the search interfaces of resources that contain data not easily or entirely searchable/accessible from general search tools like Alta Vista, Google, or Hotbot
Librarian's Index to the Internet (searchable!) from the Berkeley Public Library.
UNESCO Libraries Portal
Virtual Reference Library - outside Toronto; - Toronto residents; - Ottawa residents)

Web Site Evaluation

This section includes some general resources about how to evaluate web sites.

Criteria for Evaluating Web Sites, From Dalhousie University. They also have a checklist you can use to evaluate sites
Evaluating Information Found on the Internet, from The Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University
Evaluating Web Pages: Techniques to Apply and Questions to Ask, from UC Berkeley Library
Evaluating Web Sites: Criteria for the Classroom, from Lesley University
Evaluating Web Sites: Criteria and Tools, from Cornell University Library
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: or, Why It’s A Good Idea To Evaluate Web Sources, from New Mexico State University Library