Finding your way in that Big Library in the Sky
Most users mostly use search engines to navigate the Web, but there are thousands of search engines: how do you choose one? Even experienced searchers can learn from a visit to AskScott's very useful online Web Searching Tutorial -- it doesn't take long but it'll save you hours and you'll get better results.
As Scott says, "In general, you will be much more comfortable." That done, AskScott's very useful main page is a good place to start. It's not just a set of search-engine links, more like where you find the librarian.
AskScott's Web Searching Tutorial
http://www.askscott.com/tindex.html
AskScott main page
http://www.askscott.com/index.html
Search Engine Watch -- Learn how to search better and how the major search engines work from a searcher's perspective. Search Engine Listings, Reviews, Ratings & Tests, Search Engine Resources, and Search Engine News, a free monthly newsletter with over 110,000 readers.
http://searchenginewatch.com/
Web Searching Tips by Search Engine Watch. Using search engines better: Search Engine Math explains how to use simple commands to improve the results you get from search engines; Power Searching For Anyone -- how to do advanced searches with the major search engines; Search Features Chart is a one page summary of major search commands at various search engines, plus special search features; Boolean Searching -- how to use Boolean commands on the major search engines, and more.
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=facts
• See Education resources for teachers, students and parents for Reference and research resources, Kidsafe search engines and more.
Search engines
Google -- Excellent, flexible search engine with many advanced features: search within results, view pdf files as html, language tools, news, image search, specialised searches, newsgroups archives and interface, and more.
http://www.google.com/intl/en/
AltaVista
http://www.altavista.digital.com/
Ask Jeeves -- Ask.com: Just type in a few words or ask a question.
http://www.ask.com/
The Internet Archive: Building an 'Internet Library' -- Search for vanished web pages via the Wayback Machine, just type in the url of the missing page. The Web archived from 1996 to now, 10 billion Web pages, 100 Terabytes.
http://www.archive.org/
Directories
Yahoo
http://www.yahoo.com/
LookSmart
http://www.looksmart.com/
Open Directory Project
http://dmoz.org/
Meta-search
Mamma is a "smart" meta-search engine, searches a series of other search sites at the same time, properly formatting the words and syntax for each, compiles their results in a virtual database, eliminates duplicates, and displays them in a uniform manner according to relevance. Search Web, News, Images, Audio, Kids, Power Search.
http://www.mamma.com/
MetaCrawler collates pages found on other search engines.
http://www.metacrawler.com/
Dogpile -- "All results, no mess". Metasearch of 13 WWW Search engines, also searches Web boards via BoardReader.
http://www.dogpile.com/
Languages
The Babel Fish at AltaVista Translation -- Paste in some text and get a machine translation. Paste in a url and it will translate a whole web page for you. English to and from French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, plus Russian to English, German to French, French to German, and to and from English and Japanese, Korean and Chinese. You can test it by pasting in English text, translating to another language, then retranslating it back to English, with some hilarious results (especially with poetry) -- but it's not a fair test, and one-way translations work remarkably well. Very useful, despite some inevitable lapses and glitches.
http://babel.altavista.com/
Google has a new automatic translation feature, providing English access to a variety of non-English web pages -- available for pages published in Italian, French, Spanish, German. If your search has non-English results, there will be a link to a version of that page translated into English. Also,Translate text, or Translate a web page, search pages in any of dozens of languages and/or countries.
http://www.google.com/language_tools
International
Search Engine Colossus has links to 1,500 search engines from 196 countries. In English, French, Spanish.
http://www.searchenginecolossus.com/
News search
The Global News Portal at Mario's Cyberspace Station -- Vast news resources, searches of scores of news sources here -- a great news site by Mario Profaca, Croatian independent journalist. "Yes, the world is a sick place, and Mario Profaca is its webmaster" (The New York Times). BIG site!
http://mprofaca.cro.net/mainmenu.html
Google News and Resources -- 76 major news sources, US, national and international, plus Support, US Government.
http://www.google.com/news/
Google News -- Headline News, search and browse the latest headlines -- World, US, Business, Entertainment, Technology, Sports, continuous updates throughout the day, results grouped with several sources.
http://news.google.com/
Yahoo! News -- Yahoo has good news resources, with lots of in-depth background stuff, special reports, roundups and related resources. Customisable email news delivery service.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/
World news -- same in-depth treatment:
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/wl/
OnlineNewspapers.com - - links to more than 5,000 newspapers on the Web, worldwide, sorted by region and by country.
http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/
News Index -- "the original news-only search engine", search 300 news sources with links to full stories, plus other services such as personalized daily headlines delivered by email.
http://www.newsindex.com/
TotalNews -- Search current news stories from multiple sources.
http://www.totalnews.com/
Northern Light has a free real-time news search covering the past two weeks from 56 newswires, power search the archives for older stories.
http://www.northernlight.com/news.html
Excite News
http://news.excite.com/
Excite NewsTracker
http://nt.excite.com/
Advanced Web Search
Search websites that don't have site-search with Google Advanced Search. Select "Domains -- Only return results from the site or domain..." and enter the url of the site you want to search. Search terms can be with all of the words, with the exact phrase, with any of the words, or without the words you enter. You can also find results in a specified language, in web pages updated at a specified date, or where your search terms occur a specified number of times. Also News search (beta), Image search (beta), find similar pages, or specialized searches on the following topics: Apple Macintosh, BSD Unix, Linux, all US Government and .mil sites, and US Universities: Stanford, Brown, BYU, & more.
http://www.google.com/advanced_search
Search PDFs
Adobe PDF Search -- Search over 1 million Acrobat PDF files on the Web.
http://searchpdf.adobe.com/
Search Web boards
BoardReader -- Connecting Message Board Communities: Searches the Web's forums and message boards, searches multiple message boards simultaneously.
http://www.boardreader.com/
The Internet
Why it really matters
Internet interaction
Finding your way in that Big Library in the Sky
