Web searching made easy Other search engines

Try other search engines such as Microsoft's Live

Despite Google’s dominance, you could try using Yahoo! or Microsoft’s Live search engine for a few days and see if it makes any difference to the accuracy of the search results.

There are many smaller search engines around – these specialise in hunting down certain types of results; not to mention numerous country-specific search engines.

• Business search Take a look at Yell, Indexlink or Scoot.
• Entertainment The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is your one-stop shop for information about a particular movie, TV show or actor.
• People search Visit Spock, Wink or ZoomInfo to search for people you know.
• Meta searching Meta searching allows you to use many different search engines simultaneously and results from entirely different search engines will come back to you in one go. Some also trawl current news articles. Meta search sites include Dogpile, MetaCrawler, Clusty and Surfwax.

Search the invisible web using search engines such as Pipl

Searching the invisible web

Beyond the live pages on the web are documents that are seemingly hidden, as they won’t appear on the major search engines. These include library catalogues, websites that require a login or subscription, all kinds of databases, legal information, newspaper archives or even the profiles or groups on social networking websites. These elusive pages are collectively known as the invisible web, or deep web.

Some resources to help you search the invisible web:

• The US Census Bureau’s links to census information from around the globe.
• Use Find Articles to search millions of archived magazine and newspaper articles.
• Search scholarly literature with the help of Google’s latest tool, Google Scholar Beta.
• Intute Arts and Humanities features 21,000 searchable web resources from dozens of specialty arts and humanities subjects including drama and music.
• Pipl will uncover databases the main search engines may overlook, like newspaper databases.
• Scirus allows you to search journals, patents and much more.
• The documents page of the United Nations website allows you to search for official United Nations documentation beginning in 1993. Here you’ll also find Security Council resolutions.