Many of us use Google to search the web for personal research and library resources for scholarly publications. Sometimes, however, it’s not clear whether what we need will be on the web or in scholarly literature. I’d like to point out some nice search engines for specific types of information that combine the ease of Google with the specialization of a library database. These tools could help you make sense of the web.
To find more like these, go here for a list of 100 Useful Niche Search Engines.
Scirus – Specializing in scientific information, it allows researchers to search for journal content and also scientists’ homepages, courseware, pre-print server material, patents and institutional repository and website information. Also, its new ‘topics pages‘ are Wikipedia-style entries with identified (usually scholarly) authors.
Meta-Index to U.S. Legal Research – This site gathers search engines for U.S. legal information from across the web and puts them all in the same place. It points you towards good tools for searching legislation, judicial opinions and regulations on the web.
CiteSeer – This search engine for computer science and information science is full of features including citation analysis tools.
InternshipPrograms – A nice way to search for internships and for organizations to find interns. Register by including your résumé and interests.
Clusty – Provides search results in a list, but also includes a sidebar with categories, so you can review results by subject area.
Google – Don’t forget about Google’s own features such as Advanced search, Google Books, Google Scholar, Google News, etc.
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