Search engine alternatives

Lest we forget in all the search engine frenzy of the week, there are alternatives. The following tools help find web sites that have been vetted by librarians and other professionals, improving the chances that the user will find quality information.

• Librarians's Index to the Internet is an annotated subject directory of web sites produced by librarians in California and Washington state. All 14,000 plus entries are "evaluated by librarians for their usefulness to users of public libraries."


• INFOMINE, a production of the University of California with assistance from other librarians, searches over 100,000 links. About a quarter of them selected by librarians. The others are mined by carefully-created web crawlers. Unlike Google, INFOMINE tells you how its crawlers work and has scope and content notes about its service--including, I just learned, government information. Also, unlike Google, INFOMINE has a variety of searching and browsing capabilities.


• The Scout Archives is a searchable database of The Internet Scout Report, a weekly email newsletter with detailed descriptions of web sites. The Internet Scout Report has been available for over nine years, so they have built up a good-sized database. The sites are also browsable by Library of Congress Subject Headings.

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