Search Engines

General Tips

Try to exhaust all the resources available in the SVCC Library and databases before doing an Internet search. Be aware that most sites on the Internet do not go through the same editing process as print materials.

Evaluate the sites you use for research. You must be prepared to be your own editor and evaluate the sites for accuracy, authority, objectivity, and currency:

Accuracy	The publication of print materials has conventions that ensure accuracy. The publication of online materials does not have these conventions in place. Anyone can publish very quickly and very easily on the Web.
Authority	Who is responsible for the information on the site? Is that person or organization qualified to present that information?
Objectivity	What is the goal of the group or person presenting the information? Are they trying to persuade, sell, vent, or inform?
Currency	Is the information current? How do you know? Dates are rarely given and often only indicate when the information was placed on the Web or the last time the page was revised.

Does the page take a long time to load?

Are the links current? Do they often lead to sites that are no longer there?

Most of the search engines have a help screen. Boolean searching is available on most search engines. You may click on the help screen to find additional information on how to do more advanced searching.

When searching for phrases always put the phrase in quotation marks. This tells the search engine that you want the words searched as phrases, otherwise each word in the phrase is searched separately and will get many false hits that have nothing to do with your research.

Single Search Engines
About.com	AllTheWeb	Alta Vista
Ask Jeeves	Clusty	Excite
Google	Hotbot	INFOMINE
Internet Public Library	InvisibleWeb	Librarians' Index to the Internet
Lycos	MSN	MyWay
Overture	Teoma	WebCrawler
WWW Virtual Library	Yahoo
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Multiple Search Engines
Dogpile	Ixquick	Mamma.com
Metacrawler	Search.com	Vivisimo
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White/Yellow Pages
Bigfoot	BigYellow	Infospace
http://www.iaf.net/	National Address Server	Switchboard
Telephone Directories on the Web	WhoWhere	World Pages
World Wide Yellow Pages	Yahoo People Search	Zip2
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Miscellaneous
Google Groups	Colleges & Universities - United States	Colleges & Universities -Virginia
General Education Online (FindaSchool.org)	Eldritch Press (full-text public domain books)	Infomine - Web resources maintained by librarians at University of California
Internet Public Library - Links to reference materials and full-text books	Lii.org - Index to the internet maintained by Library of California	Scholarly Societies - Index maintained by the University of Waterloo.
Virtual Reference Shelf - Compiled by the Library of Congress

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