20 of the Best Search Engines for Students

(an excerpt from Education-Portal.com)

Google, Bing and Yahoo! are great for broad questions, but research can often be a lot easier with a focused search. Check out these 20 useful search engines that can help students find academic information, people, video, photos, audio and more.

Academic Search Engines

• Google Scholar – Powered by Google, this search engine makes it easy to find papers, abstracts, citations and other scholarly literature.

• iSEEK – Designed specifically for students and educators, iSEEK is a non-commercial search engine that delivers editor-reviewed results from universities, government sites and other noncommercial providers.

• OJOSE – The Online Journal Search Engine (OJOSE) is a search engine that can help you find, download or purchase scientific publications from over 60 different databases.

• Scirus – Scirus is another search engine focused on the sciences. It has indexed over 410 million scientific items, including journal articles, patent information, scientists’ web pages and institutional repositories.

• DMOZ – Although it’s technically not a search engine because it doesn’t index the whole Web, DMOZ, or the Open Directory Project, offers searchable access to millions of links that have been hand-picked by volunteers who are experts in their fields.

Meta Search Engines

• Whonu – Whonu searches just about everything, from popular search engines like Google and Yahoo! to websites like digg, del.icio.us and reddit. You can also filter your search by types of site, including .edu domains, or narrow your results to specific countries.

• Dogpile – Dogpile searches other search engines, such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask, to bring you the best of the web in one handy results list. You can also feel good about using Dogpile because the site donates portions of its revenue to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA.)

• Yippy – Yippy is a unique meta search engine that delivers results in related clusters to help you find exactly what you need as fast as possible.

• MetaCrawler – This meta search engine searches Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask, About, MIVA and others. You can use this engine to find information, images, videos, news, yellow page listings and white page listings.

• Mamma – Known as the ‘mother of all search engines,’ Mamma allows you to perform a general Web meta search like the above engines, or focus your results on Twitter, news feeds, images and video, local results and job opportunities.

• Info.com – Info.com returns results from everyone’s favorite search engines, including Google, Yahoo!, Bing and About. The site also offers filtering for subjects like flights, jobs, multimedia, shopping and more.

• MsFreckles – There are tons of different ways to use MsFreckles. You can search the entire web, search Google blogs, search UK sites only, search specific domains, search for multiple websites, search definitions, search scholarly papers – the list goes on and on.