Google Search Form
This ready-to-use form allows you to search the Web using what I have found to be by far the most useful search engine (I don't even bother trying anything else besides Google now). Google also allows site-specific searches, so this form can be used to search either the entire Web or FSU's Garnet server (where my web site is located). Google now indexes Adobe Acrobat (.pdf), Microsoft Word (.doc), and similar files as well as standard HTML, making it even more useful for academics because many papers that we might seek on the Web are posted in PDF format. If for some reason Google can't find what you need, you can find links to many other major search engines further down this page.
Google also offers a number of other search options, some of which are linked here:
- Google Book Search (search the full text of numerous books that Google has indexed)
- Google News (search for recent news stories from hundreds of U.S. and worldwide newspapers and other news sources)
- Google Scholar (search academic publications and working papers, and even search for citations to scholars' work)
- Other Google Services (ranging from mapping and directions to mail-order catalogs and online shopping)
Additional Search Engines and Portals
There are probably hundreds of general-purpose search engines on the Web, and many thousands of search engines that cater to a specific audience or a specific type of file. For obvious reasons, I do not attempt to list them all on this page. Instead, I list those that I have found to be most useful for my own purposes, searching for several academic keywords that are available on multiple pages on my own web site. If a search engine fails to find any of these keywords, I have no confidence that it will be able to find anything else that I may need to find, so I do not list it on this site. (For the record, Google identifies dozens of pages using each of the two keywords I use for this test, and places my own pages on the first page of search results).
- AltaVista
- DirectHit
- Excite
- Inktomi powers a variety of different sites, which therefore return the same results: GoTo.com, HotBot, InfoSeek, LookSmart, and such commercial services as AOL, CNET, MSN, and NBCi
- Lycos
- Netscape's OpenDirectory (an attempt to categorize and review web sites involving over 40,000 human editors rather than the "spiders" or "bots" employed by more conventional search engines)
- Search.com (from CNet; a meta-search engine that compiles results from at least eight separate engines, including About.com, AltaVista, Direct Hit, FindWhat, and GoTo.com)
- Yahoo!
Advice on Using Search Engines
- From the Internet Public Library's Reference Center:
- From the Okanagan University College Library in Canada Sink or Swim: Internet Search Tools and Techniques
- Search Engine Watch
- From the UC-Berkeley library:
http://garnet.acns.fsu.edu/~phensel/search.html
Last updated: 3 March 2005
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Paul R. Hensel. All rights reserved.