Internet Searching
Search engines are indexes which help you to search for web pages by keywords or phrases. They are useful for searching for specific rather than general information. These webpages contains links to a number of Internet search engines, as well as links to resources that will help to advance and improve your Internet searching. In addition, the page on Web 2.0 will introduce you to the main Web 2.0 technologies that may be beneficial when researching for academic and professional purposes.The results you find will contain a mixture of information sources, some reliable and some not so reliable. Our Further Help and Training page has links to some useful resources to help you discriminate between these and decide which Internet resources are appropriate to use in your academic work.
Although Internet Searching is a useful, if not vital part of academic and professional research, we recommend that in the first instance, you use the Digital Library's Advanced (Subject) Search to find information in your subject area. This will give you access to good quality and peer-reviewed academic information. You might also want to take a look at our library guides.
Search Engines
There are a large number of search engines available for finding information on the Internet. You can search using engines from the three main providers below.
You can use Google Scholar to search for academic literature. Please follow our instructions webpage to learn how to access library subscribed content through Google Scholar.
Other search engines you might want to try include:
Exalead: makes suggestions for related terms you might want to search, displays thumbnail images of webpages next to results and has user-friendly advanced search options.
Metacrawler: allows you to search more than one search engine at once.
Zuula and Turboscout allow you to search and check results from a variety of different search engines.
SimilarPages: has a very intuitive interface. It allows you to go beyond the most popular webpages, easily locating others with similar information. Take a tour to find out more.
Broken Links
When searching the Internet, or accessing URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) you are bound to come across broken or dead links. Broken links generally occur when a webpage moves or no longer exists. Accurate referencing of web resources is important as it provides you with the details required to attempt to re-locate them if a broken link occurs.Due to the fluid and fast moving, dynamic nature of the Internet, broken links are fairly common and can therefore cause big issues, especially in academia and government organisations. There are therefore a number of projects that aim to archive webpages, for example:
- The Internet Archive is essentially an online library working to archive and preserve websites, moving images, texts, audio and software.
Take a look at their WayBack machine for a "snapshot" of website history, in some cases going all the way back to 1996. - The National Archives is the official archive of the UK government. They have archived a large and increasing number of webpages helping to maintain access to government policies and web content.