| Subject Directories with an Academic Focus | Description and Definitions |
|---|---|
| intute | British unified nationwide network of academic subject directories |
| intute: Science and Technology | major subject sub-set of above |
| intute: Arts and Humanities | major subject sub-set of above |
| intute: Social Sciences | major subject sub-set of above |
| intute: Health andLife Sciences | major subject sub-set of above |
| Voice of the Shuttle: Web-site for Humanities Research |  THE
premiere humanities collection of web sites |
| Best Information on the Net | St. Ambrose University Library; extensive Hot Paper Topics webliography |
| BUBL Link: Catalogue of Internet ResourcesStrathclyde U, Andersonian Library, Glasgow; uses Dewey Classification system as the primary organisation structure for its catalogue; a good site to explore for a European slant on quality Internet sites | |
| INFOMINE: Scholarly Internet Resource Collections | UC-Riverside; supported by the California Digital Library |
| The Internet Scout Project | Begun in 1994, the Scout Project has focused on developing better tools and services for finding, filtering, and presenting online information and metadata in and for academic purposes. Funded by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and part of the University's College of Letters and Sciences |
| Librarian's Internet Index: Websites you can trust | supported in by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Internet Public Library and the iSchool at Drexel |
| Slightly different in scope and focus, nevertheless the following two sites need to be viewed as very helpful subject directories for academic pursuits. | |
| The WWW Virtual Library | The oldest academic subject directory on the Web; it is a highly respected directory sponsored by the W3 Consortium. Many of the guides are very comprehensive, however some guides have languished and are not updated frequently. Examine each subject guide with care. |
| dmoz: open directory project | dmoz [sic, no caps] is not an academic subject directory but instead an effort to build the largest human-edited directory of the web. |
| Defining a subject directory: a service that offers a collection of links to Internet resources submitted by site creators or evaluators and organized into subject categories. Directory services use selection criteria for choosing links to include, though selectivity and criteria vary among services. | |
Reasons you might use a subject directory rather than a search engine
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| Page Updated: 15 July 2009 | Page Created: 1 September 1999 |
| Selected Search Engines | Description and Definitions |
|---|---|
| Definition:
Definition: A search engine service provides a searchable database of Internet files collected by a computer program, called a wanderer, crawler, robot, worm or spider. Indexing is created from the collected files, and the results are presented in a schematic order. There is no selection criteria for the collection of files. A search service therefore consists of three components: (1) a spider, a program that traverses the Web from link to link, identifying and reading pages; (2) an index, a database containing a copy of each Web page gathered by the spider; and (3) a search engine mechanism, software that enables users to query the index and that returns results in a schematic order. |
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| Recommended Search Engines | UC-Berkeley; which notes that overlap studies show that 80% of the pages in a major search engine's database exist only in that database; meaning that it is wise to use more than one search engine especially for academic research |
| Below are the 4 most utilized search engines (90%+ market share) in the United States in alphabetical order; next in alphabetical order are less used but still active search engines. NOTE that without exception these are .com sites which MUST make money by pushing adversting; all these vendors allow advertising revenue to effect search results at least some of the time. | |
| Ask.com | |
| Bing.com | Microsoft's new entry (June 2009) |
| Google.com | |
| Yahoo! com | |
| Altavisa.com | home to Babel Fish Translation service |
| Dogpile.com | |
| Excite.com | |
| HotBot.com | |
| Lycos.com | |
| Page Updated: 15 July 2009 | Page Created: 1 September 1999 |