Search engines

Search engines can be a useful starting point for discovering resources on the Internet, though often it may be better to use a specialist subject gateway.  It is important that you are critical in judging the quality of the information that you find on the Internet. Our page on how to use search engines, including Google, effectively also describes the limitations of search engines. You should use MetaLib if you wish to research a topic thoroughly. This will give you references to quality, usually refereed, published research.

On this page:

• General search engines
• Multi-search engines
• Country-specific
• Academic & science search engines
• University of Bristol research interests
• Open Archives search engines

General search engines

• Google
  • See also the selective Google scholar for scholarly and scientific resources and Google book search for searching the full-text of books
  • and Googleguide for help.
    

• All the Web (was FAST Search)
• Alta Vista: the default search is of UK sites
• Ask Jeeves UK / Ask.com
• Britannica Internet Guide: selective
• Clusty: with 'clusters' to help navigate results
• Exalead is an innovative new service with many advanced features including truncation, approximate spelling and phonetic search; displays thumbnails with results
  
• Excite: the default search is of the Excite website
• HotBot UK
• Lycos: the default search is of UK sites
• Yahoo UK & Ireland

Back to top

Multi-search engines

• Turboscout and Zuula access many search engines without retyping your query
• Dogpile UK (multiple search)
• Ixquick (multiple search)
• MetaCrawler (multiple search)
• Search.com (multiple search)

Back to top

Country-specific

• British Information: UK specific
• Freesearch: UK focused with image search and dictionary
• UK plus: quality checked UK sites
• UK search: UK specific, including "deep linking"
• Yell.com: UK specific directory of businesses
• European search engines, directories and lists

Back to top

Academic & science search engines

• Google scholar for scholarly and scientific resources
• Scirus, Science Research and Citeseer: scientific resources
  
• CrossRef Search is a single search across the combined catalogues of 43 publishers; our link points to the Institute of Physics Publishing (IOPP) interface, but will search across all of the participating publishers.
  

Back to top

University of Bristol research interests

• IRIS Publications: metadata only
• ROSE: the Bristol Repository of Scholarly Eprints, mostly full text

Back to top

Open Archives search engines

To search for resources conforming to Open Archives Initiative (OAI) standards) try the 'Material type--Open Access (OA) publishing' resources in MetaLib.

Back to top