The web

The Internet can provide a wealth of information - not all of it is good and reliable. Read our tips on Evaluating websites to help you judge the value of what you have found. Our search tips (below) can also help you make a search more accurate and save you time.

Databases are the best place to find academic articles on a topic - go to Subject help to find out which ones to use.

Below are a selection of search engines and directories you can use to find information on the web.

Guides and tutorials on searching the Internet

• Intute Virtual Training Suite - offers excellent tutorials in specific subject areas spiced up with quizzes and interactive exercises. Tour key web sites for your subject; find out how to search the Internet; learn how to judge sites; and read tips on making the most of the Internet for your studies.
• TONIC - an excellent online course produced by Netskills.

Search tips

When using many search engines, these tips can help improve the relevancy of your results:

• avoid irrelevant matches by using the plus symbol in front of words you want eg +raw +sewage
• omit false matches by use a minus symbol in front of words you don't want eg -treated
• search for phrases using inverted commas eg "raw sewage"
• use partial sentences as search terms eg "wire a plug" instead of "how to wire a plug"

Other search engines might use different symbols to achieve the same results. Check their help pages for details.  

Search engines and Internet directories

This is a selection of the search engines and Internet directories available.

Academic search engines and directories

• BUBL
• Google Scholar - use to find scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research 
• Intute
• Scirus – science search engine developed by Elsevier. Searches their ScienceDirect database along with 250 million science-related web pages, ArXiv e-prints archive, Institute of Physics articles, Medline, Nasa reports, 15 million patents (European, Japanese and US) and theses.

Other search engines and directories 

Compare the major search engines using Thumbshots Ranking - just type in your topic and you'd be surprised how little overlap there is in their coverage! So make sure you search more than one!

• AltaVista
• Ask.com - ask a question in plain English!
• Cuil - claims to search three times more of the Internet than Google
• dmoz - directory of the web, allows you to browse by category
• Dogpile - meta search engine that searches across Google, Yahoo and other search engines
• Exalead - sign up and you can personalise it; advanced search functions include word stemming, approximate spelling, filetype searching; narrow searches too eg non-commercial sites
• Google - probably the most popular search engine. Also provides a web directory - assigning sites to various categories.
• Galaxy - a searchable Internet directory compiled by humans not computers
• Yahoo- allows you to use search operators (and,or) and indexes a larger part of documents than Google

Find other search engines using the Search Engine Colossus - an international directory of search engines.