Internet searching: sites to explore
Gateways : browse the following to see what there is of relevance for your subject area:
Intute www.intute.ac.uk hand-selected academic resources
DOAJ - Peer-reviewed open access journals listed at http://www.doaj.org/
OISTER www.oaister.org/ is a union catalogue of digital resources
OpenDOAR www.opendoar.org to search academic repositories
InfoMine – http://infomine.ucr.edu/ University of California
JISCMAIL – www.jiscmail.ac.uk for mailing lists
Use the World of Learning (via http://oxlip-plus.ox.ac.uk) to locate academic sites
Compare an entry of interest to you on Encylopedia Britannica via oxlip-plus with Wikipedia
Google http://www.google.co.uk
Look at the advanced search options, search hints and help and try out some of the features such as the “phrase search” or link:specific page or searching in one site or group of sites or domain.
http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html
Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com/
Search for material relevant to you. You could perhaps compare Google Scholar results for your subject area with a subscription indexing service (available via http://oxlip-plus.ox.ac.uk) What are the key journals in your subject area – are they included?
Compare search engines by doing a search in Google and comparing with the display and results in eg:
Exalead http://www.exalead.co.uk/search
Try out some of the search engine’s referred to on Phil Bradley’s site: http://www.philb.com/whichengine.htm
You can use http://www.ranking.thumbshots.com to compare results of selected search engines or http://www.turboscout.com/ to run the same search quickly across different search engines.
Metasearch engines: try Clusty (www.clusty.com) and Metacrawler (www.metacrawler.com)
You can use Google to Customise your own Search Engine: http://www.google.com/coop/cse/
Keep track of your web-sites through services such as www.furl.net, http://www.stumbleupon.com/ and http://del.icio.us/ which also offer social bookmarking or tagging of websites.
Set up RSS feeds so you can be alerted when material is added to your favourite site or blogs. Use your home browser or a reader such as Google Reader to collect the feeds.
Set up a personalised webpage using i-Google or Netvibes to bring all your feeds, favourites and tags together plus widgets for the weather, calculators, horoscopes and all sorts of such toys.
Go back in time with the Wayback Machine : Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/index.php
Interested in finding out more about developments on the web?
Try looking at Phil Bradley’s webpage at: http://www.philb.com/
or Karen Blakeman’s site at http://www.rba.co.uk/
JR/21.11.08