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Internet Search Tools
There are many ways to locate information on the Internet. No one way is perfect, and a thorough search should involve several
of the search methods provided below. This section of the Nelson Political Science site provides tips and links to a variety
of search engines.
The Internet can also be used to search for bibliographic information.
Ingenta is an extremely
useful way to search for printed material. This database covers an enormous number
of academic periodicals. In addition to searching for keywords, you can look up
a journal by title to see what other articles might appear in that issue.
SUBJECT OR SITE SEARCHING
The Searchability Guides to Academic Search Engines
is a very useful site that directs you to different search sites, according to specific subjects. An enormous number of specialized
search engines are provided here to help academic researchers.
Parliamentary
Business and Publications Search Engine - search for key words in the debates
and journals of the House of Commons and Senate, as well as committee reports
and transcripts of hearings.
Search
- Government of Canada Sites searches for keywords across the government of Canada's many sites. Also try:
Supreme Court of Canada Decisions -
Use the search engine at the bottom of the page to find the decisions of the court that contain your keywords. Then you will
be able to read the full text of those decisions on-line.
FedWorld
Information Network Home Page - search U.S. government sites.
United
Nations Web Search - search the many United Nations sites using keywords.
Canada411
- Look up an individual's or company's phone number and address. If they're listed
in the phone book, you should be able to find them here.
Postal
Code Lookup - Canada Post provides a site where you can find the postal code
for an address.
INTERNET SEARCH ENGINES
Google
is the reigning champion for internet
searching, providing access to recent news items and
images, as well as the usual coverage of web pages.
Yahoo! is
another popular starting point for conducting searches
for material on the Internet. Not only can you search for Web sites by key words, but the site also provides a very
powerful set of indexed pages to browse entries for sites on specific subjects.
MSN
provides good coverage for internet searches, compiling results
from several sources.
Teoma
is a relative newcomer but has gained a large share of search
traffic.
AltaVista
is another powerful individual search engine. A useful tip is to put a phrase
you want to search into quotation marks when you fill in the search field. For
example, the search on "freedom of expression" will look for that exact phrase
in Web pages. Also, try the AltaVista
Canada Search Engine.
Meta searching allows simultaneous searches to be conducted across many Web page databases at
the same time, and can be a powerful and time-saving method for looking for material:
- The most innovative of
the meta searchers is Ask Jeeves. At this site, you can look
for information by asking plain English questions; for example, "How many members are there in the Canadian House of Commons?"
- Britannica.com provides useful summaries of search results.
- Copernic is another very useful meta searcher, which involves
downloading and installing the (free) search software onto your computer.
- Dogpile
provides some of the most thorough meta-searching, but organizes the results
by the individual search engines to which it has submitted your keywords,
so you can have a very long list to look through.
-
Ixquick offers fast meta searches for web page material as
well as news items, graphics, and MP3s.
- MetaCrawler
orders the results and eliminates multiple returns of the same page, but its
default settings offer fewer hits than does Dogpile.
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