March 2000
Newsletter #34
 

Off- Campus Storage Frees Space for New Books

Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database

Study Carrels Wired

Untangling the Web: Specialized Search Engines

Electronic Reference Shelf

Literary Gold Mine Online

CETEDOC Library of Christian Latin Texts

Tax Forms Available

Food for Fines

Barbecues: an Occasion for Sin?

Jon Reynolds, University Archivist

Third Century Campaign Progress

CNDLS: Collaboration to Focus on New Learning Environments

There are hundreds of millions of sites on the Web, and just about every search engine claims to be the one and only place to go for every type of information. Don’t believe it! There is no perfect place on the Internet that will provide all the answers. Sometimes it is useful to go to a specialized search engine. For instance, to find information from medical sites, try Biocrawler <http://www.biocrawler.com/>. For Law, one of the very best resources is FindLaw <http://www.findlaw.com/>. To locate a specialized search engine from a wide range of possibilities, go to BigHub.com <http://www.thebighub.com/>.

International Search Engines
For a more international focus, try Search Engine Colossus <http://www.searchenginecolossus.com/> or Search Engines Worldwide <http://www.twics.com/%7Etakakuwa/search/>. These sites link to country-specific search engines for countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. The number of search engines available for each country can vary considerably. The Yemen page links to one search engine, but Canada has approximately 50 links to engines specializing in finding sites from Canada. Search Engine Colossus also lists search engines in eleven general categories, including Academic, Business, Medical, and Music.

The Invisible Web
A lot of information on the Internet is locked away in databases that cannot be indexed by search engines. These databases, not searchable by any search engine, make up what is called the “invisible web.” To access this information, try searching InvisibleWeb.com <http://www.invisibleweb.com/>, which catalogs searchable resources across the Web.

Where to learn more about Search Engines
For more information about search engines, the following sites are updated often and contain very useful tips:

Search Engine Showdown <http://www.notess.com/search/>
Search Engine Watch <http://searchenginewatch.internet.com/>
Search IQ <http://www.searchiq.com/>

Internet research classes taught by Georgetown librarians are also held every month in the Lauinger Library. To sign up for a class, go to <http://data.georgetown.edu/uis/training/list.cfm#World Wide Web>.