Subject Directories Academic Directories Infomine--Scholarly Internet Resource Collections Resource Discovery Network (RDN) (British) General Directories Librarian's Index to the Internet Internet Public Library Open Directory/Google Directory Yahoo! Directory WWW Virtual Library

Search Engines Google Teoma Yahoo! MSN Search Specialized Search Tools Scirus: Scientific search engine Clusty Gov+: U.S. Government search engine Google UncleSam: U.S. Government search engine Google Scholar: Searches for Academic publications SMEAL Search: Searches for academic business papers

Meta-Searchers Dogpile Kartoo (visual search engine) Clusty Faculty Favorites Favorite directories and engines of library faculty are: Google Librarian's Internet Index Clusty's Governent Search Teoma

Comparison Chart of Search Engine Features (from Search Engine Showdown)
Recommended Search Engines: Table of Features (from UC Berkeley)

Subject Directories Subject directories or guides are search tools that are created by people. Web-sites are submitted, evaluated, and arranged into hierarchical subject categories. This means that someone has attempted to organize the huge information world of the web in order to help you make sense of it. Beginning a broad search with a general directory, such as Librarian's Internet Index, or Google Directory, will often lead you to a few relevant starting points.

Search Engines The term "search engine" is often used to refer to any kind of tool that searches the web.  Search Engines are actually specific kinds of tools that use robot software to go out into the huge information world of the internet and  gather sites by matching words in specified areas of the text of websites. No person sees, evaluates, or organizes the web documents that search engines find.    Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Teoma are thorough, but often return huge numbers of documents.   Some engines present your search results to you in ranked and/or subject oriented lists.  These rankings may be useful, but remember that the results are being calculated by a computer that doesn't think but only matches and counts.    While search engines get their information and links from the same world wide web, each engine searches and displays results of those searches differently. A nice introduction to the features and tools in the most recommended search engines is available from the University of California at Berkeley

Metasearchers Meta -Search Engines, such as Clusty and Dogpile,  run your search through several search engines at once and display all the results in one list.  Use a metasearcher to compare the results from the differrent search engines. These search tools can also arrange your results in helpful ways.  Clusty organizes results into topics.  Kartoo organizes results visually on the screen and show the links between connected webpages.