Nelson - Political Science-Internet Search Tools

INTERNET SEARCH STRATEGIES

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.

There are subject or site-specific search engines, such as the one that searches all Government of Canada pages.
An Internet search engine, such as AltaVista, allows you to search for keywords and phrases in a database of millions of Web pages or newsgroups.
Web index sites complement their Web-searching capacity with a handy index of sites organized by topic. These sites are useful for finding a range of sites related to a broad category.
Meta Search Engines are powerful tools that submit your keywords to many search engines simultaneously.

The Internet can also be used to search for bibliographic information. Two very useful sites allow you to find out which books or journals are most relevant to the topic you are researching.

The Carl/UnCover service is another extremely useful way to search for printed material. This database is limited to journal articles, but it covers an enormous number of 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.

CARL/Uncover Periodical Database

Once connected, choose:

Search the UnCover database, then
Search UnCover Now

SUBJECT OR SITE SEARCHING

TheSearchability 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

Yahoo! is the most 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.

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 theAltaVista 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 isAsk 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.
Google searches and index of over a billion pages.
Go Network Express is an excellent meta search engine, which works with software you download and install on your own computer for free.
InvisibleWeb provides extensive searches and subject directories.
MetaCrawler orders the results and eliminates multiple returns of the same page, but its default settings offer fewer hits than does Dogpile.

Also try:

Search Thingy allows you to enter your search query once and then choose which of a number of search engines to use.

Web index sites provide you with Internet searching capabilities, as well as useful category sites arranged by topic. For the sections provided below, you can launch a search directly by filling in one of the forms. However, if you want to browse the Web Index by topics and categories, you should click on the logo or name of the service to connect to their opening page. Click on the "options," "help," or "tips" link for each engine to learn how to make your search most effective for that specific service.

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