About search engines

Compare search engines
Enhance your searching
Links to some popular and more obscure search engines
Metasearch

Alternatives to search engines

Directories
Repositories

Specific types of information

Audio & Video
Blogs
Discussions
Images
News
Patents
People
Scholarly & scientific

Extras

Mobile searching from your cellphone or PDA
Create your own customized search engine

Search engines

• Google
• Bing
• Yahoo
• Ask
• Exalead
• Hakia
• Gigablast
• Blekko
• There are lots! You might try this categorized list.

Enhance your searching

• A recent New York Times article that sheds some light on how search works.
• Google: Learn about Features or search operators. Set up Preferences, or use the Advanced Search screen.
• Bing: has its own lists of features and search operators and search keywords. Set search preferences. An Advanced Search box is available after you do a search. General help is here.
• Yahoo: basic search screen, Preferences, Site Explorer, shortcuts, and Advanced Search screen
• Firefox add-ons
  • OptimizeGoogle
  • GetCloudlet
  • A recent list of some others you might find useful or fun (or in Firefox go to the Tools>Add-ons menu tofind lots and lots.)
• Add search engines to the search box in Firefox or IE
• How to add PubMed to your search engine list in either Firefox or IE
• NLM toolbar

Compare Search Engines

Compare results

• Zuula
• Twingine
• Thumbshots
• Scour

Compare features

• http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/features/ (Also has reviews of search engines.)

Combine Results (metasearch)

• Dogpile
• Yippy (formerly Clusty)
• Pandia

Directories: lists of links

• NIH Library internet resources links chosen by librarians
• Internet Public Library 2 links chosen and described by librarians
• del.icio.us links tagged by the people
• InfoMine links chosen by librarians
• DMOZ open directory project
• CompletePlanet

Repositories: content lives in the site

• YouTube
• Flickr
• PubMed

Scholarly & scientific information

• Google Scholar
  • Visit Preferences to add NIH Library Full-Text and to add EndNote or Reference Manager to download options
  • Use Advanced search screen to refine search
• Microsoft Academic Search recently re-released and with some interesting visualization tools
• SearchMedica relevant, authoritative, and timely clinical information
• HealthMash
• Scirus (can also be accessed via Scopus)
• WorldWideScience
• OAIster (catalog of digital resources)
• Science.gov
• GlobalSpec for engineering
• Vadlo for "biomedical and life sciences"
• NationMaster good for nation based statistics and visual tools
• Melissa Data extensive list of data sources on business, statistics and people

Blog searching

• Technorati
• blogsearchengine.com
• Bloglines
• IceRocket
• Research Blogging
• Twitter Search

Discussions

• Omgili
• Boardreader
• Yahoo groups
• Googlegroups

News

• Google News
• YahooNews
• AskBigNews
• NewsNow
• NewsBrief / NewsExplorer
• Silobreaker
• Also try specific news sources, like NY Times or ScienceNews.

Patents

• Free Patents Online
• Google Patents
• Patent Lens
• Scopus (licensed for NIH users)
• US Patent and Trademark Office

People

• Pipl
• Professional networking sites: LinkedIn and Naymz
• Spokeo searches social networking sites
• Biomedexperts analyzes PubMed records to find people related by topic and by networks of co-authorship
• ResearcherID integrated with Web of Science and EndNote Web, allows you to create an online bibliography of your publications
• Authoratory database of contact information, professional interests, social connections and funding
• If you're looking for an expert on a topic, try searching for prolific or highly cited authors in PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science,etc.

Image search

• Tag Galaxy
• Google Image
• Picsearch
• Bing Images

Specialized Image repositories

• Government Resources of Science Images detailed list of various US Gov't sources of images
• Biomed-Search (over 1 million images, figures or schema from biomedical articles)
• Images from the History of Medicine (NLM)
• Library of Congress Prints & Photographs
• A nice list of online collections of medical images can be found at Cornell.
• Japanese woodblock prints on health-related themes at UCSF
• Medieval Medical Illustrations from UNC

Audio(Podcasts) & Video

Directories & repositories

• iTunes store
• podcastalley
• Podcast.com
• PodcastDirectory
• YouTube
• Vimeo

Search tools that index the text on the page around the video

• Google Video search
• AOL video search (formerly Truveo)

Tools that convert the audio to text and then index that text (with mixed results)

• Blinkx
• SearchVideo.org

Mobile Search

Search sites that are customized for viewing on a phone or PDA:

• Google
• Yahoo
• Ask
• Taptu
• PubMed

Info about search engines you can use by text messaging:

• Google
• ChaCha

Make your own custom search engine

• Rollyo
• Google CSE