Sonoma County Library

 

Search the Web


Favorite Search Tools Web Search Engines Web Subject Directories Mail and News Search Tools Meta Search EnginesWeblog & RSS Feed Search ToolsSearch Government Information

Quick Links

A9AllthewebAlta VistaAnswers.comAsk.comClustyDogpileExciteGoogleHotBotIceRocketInfoMineIxquickLibrarians' Internet IndexLycosMamma.comMetaCrawlerMSNVivísimoWebcrawlerYahoo! Yahoo en español

Favorite Search Tools

Google
Fast results and very effective relevancy ranking. Google Help: Cheat Sheet has searching tips.

Librarians' Internet Index
Real human librarians contributed these sites and classed them under human language subject terms. Especially good coverage of California-related information.
 

Web Search Engines

A9       [Help]

Alltheweb
   [Help]

Alta Vista
        [Advanced Search]

Answers.com    [Help

Ask.com     

Bing   - the latest version of Microsoft's former "Live Search."

Clusty  -  shows you "clusters" of subjects so you can quickly narrow down your search results.   [Help]

Cuil   - previews of web pages in your search results.

Excite         [Excite Help]   [Advanced Search]

Google           [Google Help]

HotBot         [Help]   [Advanced Search]

IceRocket     

Lycos        [Lycos Help]   

MSN   - the search is powered by Bing.  

Webcrawler       [More info]   [Advanced Search]

Yahoo! Search      

Yahoo! Telemundo Search (Buscar en Español)
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Web Subject Directories

Librarians' Internet Index (LII)
Annotations by librarians intended for public library users and their questions.

InfoMine
Selected by librarians at the University of California. This directory has an academic focus and includes resources marked $ that are subscription-only. To get only the sites that are freely available outside the University, use Advanced search and select Free under "Resource access."

Forbes Best of the Web
Selected by the editors of Forbes magazine.

Google Directory (DMOZ)
This Open Directory project is created by volunteers, and the entries are screened by the Google staff.

Yahoo
Subject directory contains links to web sites evaluated by human catalogers.

Yahoo Telemundo (Sitios del Internet en Español)
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Meta Search Engines

These services piggyback on other search engines to search more than one database simultaneously.

Dogpile
Searches 25 Web, Usenet and News search engines, 3 at a time. Can customize the order in which databases are searched.

Ixquick
Searches the major search engines and then discards duplicates. Also lets you search for music, images. Ranks results.

Mamma.com
Choose to search from the Web or stock quotes, MP3 sites, images, or video.

MetaCrawler
Good ranking and relevance criteria. Can limit by region or domain.
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Mail and News Searching Tools

Google's Index to Usenet (Google Groups)
Index to Usenet newsgroups. Good tool if you want to find a specific piece of information you think has been discussed in a newsgroup.

TileNet
Index to Mailing Lists and Usenet news. Good tool for finding electronic discussion groups on a topic.

Weblog and RSS Search Tools

Technorati
Blog searching by keyword or URL.

Blogpulse
Advanced search option allows you to limit by date range.