How Do I Search the Web?

Subject directories are human created, selective, and arranged by topic. They are good for broad topics and for finding a few good sites on a particular topic.

Academic

• BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) (Germany) - multi-disciplinary scholarly, open-access web resources
• Internet Scout (US) - critically annotated, carefully selected web sites and mailing lists
• Pinakes (UK) - links to major subject gateways
• SSRN (Social Science Research Network) eLibrary Database Search - scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers
• VLRC (Virtual Learning Resources Center (International) - academic information websites
• WWW Virtual Library (International) - high quality guides to particular sections of the web

General

• Dotdash (formerly About.com)
• DMOZ (formerly Open Directory Project)

Canadian

• Library and Archives Canada Browse by Topic
• DAO (Digital Archive Online) (Toronto Public Library)

These are machine generated, non-selective, and search as many web pages as possible. They're good for unique or specific keywords or topics.

Search Engines

• Ask
• Bing
• DuckDuckGo - the search engine that doesn't track you
• Ecosia - the search engine that plants trees [learn more in this story: Easy as 1-2-tree: McMaster students promoting search engine to support reforestation]
• Google
• Google Scholar - a scholarly subset of Google 
• OpenAlex - free and open catalog of the world's scholarly papers, researchers, journals, and institutions
• Qwant - the search engine that respects your privacy
• Scienceresearch.com - scientific journals and public science databases
• Swisscows - utilizes semantic maps and does not store user data, anonymous search engine
• WorldWideScience - global science gateway
• Yahoo
• Yandex

Blog & Social Media Search Engines

• Social Searcher - free social media search engine

Meta-Search Engines  - cross-search multiple subject directories and search engines.

• Dogpile
• StartPage (by Ixquick) - provides search results from over ten search engines in full privacy
• SurfWax
• WebCrawler
• Yippy

Beta, Experimental, New, Specialized - a variety of tools and resources

• Consensus - a search engine that uses AI to find insights in research papers
• Creative Commons
• Dataset Search with Google-  discover datasets hosted in thousands of repositories across the web
• Google Books
• Google Images 
• Google News 
• OAIster - online collections of books, journals, audio, images, movies
• OpenMD - search billions of documents from medical organizations, journals, and databases
• The Infography - professors, librarians, and other scholars recommend the best sources of information about their subjects of expertise
• Internet Archive Scholar - archived open access papers that may no longer be available elsewhere
• iTools - search, language and research tools on one page
• Semantic Scholar - artificial intelligence (AI) powered research tool for scientific literature (see guide)
• TinEye - reverse image search
• WayBack Machine - archived web pages
• WolframAlpha - a computational knowledge engine

 More on web searching & web search tools.

• Fagan Finder - brings together the largest, broadest, and most significant tools for finding information
• Google Guide - an online interactive tutorial and reference for experienced users, novices, and everyone in between
• ReadWrite - weblog that provides web technology news, reviews and analysis, covering web apps, web technology trends, social networking and social media
• Search Engine Colossus - international directory of search engines
• Search Engine Land - news and information about search engine marketing, optimization & search engines
• Search Engine Watch - news and information about search engines & search engine marketing
• WebLens - provides access to web design, Internet marketing, and net search tools and resources

• Evaluating Information Sources (McMaster University Library)
• Evaluating Primary Source Web Sites (RUSA History Section, American Library Association)
• Evaluating Resource Quality - Web Resources (Christopher Center Library, Valparaiso University)
• Evaluating Resources (Berkeley Library, University of California)
• Evaluating Sources (Duke University Libraries)
• Evaluating Web Pages (Wolfgram Memorial Library, Widener University)
• Evaluation Criteria (NMSU Library, New Mexico State University)
• How to Evaluate a Web Page (Colorado State University Libraries)