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This page gives access to a range of specialist search engines.
There are search engines designed for children. These are designed to access child safe material from the web and to exclude explicit, adult and other undesirable material. A number of the links access further collections of search engines suitable for children.
The Deep Web, sometimes also known as the Invisible, Hidden or Dark Web and even Deepnet is an immense collection of material not normally searched by ordinary search engines and not covered fully, even by the search engines that do search it. Primarily it is an area designed to assist researchers. The Deep Web provides an easy to understand tutorial explaining this area.
Finally, there is an ever expanding collection of specialist search engines in topics from Animals to World, with an added section of miscellaneous, specialist search engines.
For ordinary search engines, metasearch engines and search directories, visit the Other Search Engines page.
Children’s Search Engines
- ALA Great Web Sites for
Kids
‘A directory of sites selected by members of the American Library Association using rigorous evaluation guidelines.’ - Ask For Kids
‘Answers vetted for appropriateness.’ - Awesome Library
‘30 000 carefully reviewed resources, including the top 5% in education.’ - Dibdabdoo
‘Smarter, safer way to search the Internet.’ - Family Source
‘Searching 955 235 family safe web pages.’ - Ivy’s Search Engine Resources for Kids
‘Search forms for major Internet search engines for kids, links to web guides for kids, some specialized search engine forms and specialized search engine links of interest to kids. At the bottom there are links to family friendly or general WWW filtered search engines, links to more pages like this.’
Excellent ! - KidsClick
- Kids.net.au
Database of suitable sites, information. - Kids Search Tools
Search many children’s engines from one page. - Know Play
Links to atlases, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, world information, art information, acronyms, other language help. - Kids & Teens
Open Directory Project. ‘Kids and Teens is targeted for audiences 18 and under. This directory is For kids, Not About kids.’ - Sensei
Australian site linked to Sensis. Has search [web, images, news, dictionary, Wikipedia], converter, calculator, Parental information, Teacher information, lessons to develop search skills, scrapbook help, more. - TekMom
Suitable search engines for younger people. Some for specific study areas. - Yahoo Kids
Deep Web Searching
Most useful for in-depth information or answers, particularly academic. Also when after reference materials.
- Deep Web Research Resources and Sites
‘Subject Tracer™ Information Blog developed and created by the Virtual Private Library™. Designed to bring together the latest resources and sources on an ongoing basis from the Internet for deep web research.’
Highly Regarded ! - 99 Resources to Research
And Mine the Invisible Web. ‘The following resources were designed to help you mine the invisible web, offering specialised search engines, directories, and more places to find the complex and obscure.’ - Complete Planet
Probably the best. Also check their Help Site - DeepDyve
‘We are DeepDyve, the research engine for the Deep Web.’ - Gateway of Library Catalogues
Via the US Library of Congress. - Google Scholar
‘Specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research, articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, scholarly articles available across the web.’ Also access Google Scholar Help. - Invisible Web
- Northern Light
Using the Invisible/Deep Web
Articles and guides to help use this valuable resource.
- Invisible or Deep Web
‘What it is, How to find it, Its inherent ambiguity.’ University of California, Berkeley Library. - The Invisible Web
How To Find and Search the Invisible Web. Article, embedded and other links. From About. - The Ultimate Guide to the Invisible Web
Online Education Database. Information with links to clarification, further information. Search tools, references, resources.
Specialist Search Engines
Access specific topics & learning areas.
Animals
- Animal Crawler
Quick Links, Popular Searches, more. - Animal Search
Alphabetical listings.
The Arts
- Adam
Architecture, design, fine art. - Artifact
Now part of Intute. - Art Search Australia
- Art Search International
- Audiogalaxy
Music. - Craft Search Australia
- Craft Search International
- SAPLING
Architecture, Planning & Landscape. - The Art Museum Image Consortium
Fee-based.
Blogs, Forums, Message Boards
- BoardReader
Web forums, message boards. - Bloglines
- CataList
The Official Catalogue of LISTSERV Lists. - Keotag
Designed to use keywords to search blogs and bookmarking sites. - Sphere
- TagJag !
Similar to Keotag. - Topica
Newsletters, discussions.
Books
- AbeBooks
‘The world’s largest online marketplace for books. Lists over 100 million new, used, rare, out of print books from more than 13 500 booksellers.’ - AddALL
‘Book Search and Price Comparison.’ - Biblioz
Book search wizard. - Bookfinder.com
‘Compare prices on over 125 million books for sale.’ New to out of print, international to textbooks. - Google Book Search
‘Search the full text of books to find ones that interest you. Where to buy or borrow them.’ - Search Inside the Book
‘Allows you to search millions of pages to find exactly the book you want to buy. Search Inside! results are displayed interspersed with results that match the title and/or author of the book.’ Part of Amazon.
Business
- AardvarkBusiness
‘Best business Web sites around the world’. - Business.com
The Business Search Engine®. - Gobango
- Jayde.com
The B2B Search Engine - Kompass
‘2.2M companies in 70 countries referenced by 54 000 product & service keywords, 822 000 trade names, 4.2M executive names.’ - ZoomInfo
‘Premier business information search engine, with profiles on more than 35 million people and 3.8 million companies. Quick and easy access to in-depth information on industries, companies, people, products, services, jobs.’
Computing & IT
- Astalavista
Security related. - BotSpot® the spot for all bots
- CiteSeer
Publications Research Index. - CMC Info
Computer-Mediated Communication Information Sources. - CompInfo
Corporate IT, software, computers & communications. - Free Pint
Alerting service. - Internet Scout Project
Alerting service. - ResearchBuzz
Search Engine News, Information. - Sourcebank
‘Directory of links to source code and script posted around the Web.’ - StaticICE
Australian search engine for computer products. Comparison prices, etc.. - WhatIs.com
Definitions, fast references & categories.
Database Searching
- Australian Bureau of Statistics
- British Library - Inside
Journals, articles & conference material. Fee-based. - DataStar Web
Business, company information. Fee-based. - Dialog
- Eldis
‘Share the best in development policy, practice, research. Browse more than 24 000 summarised documents from over 4 500 development organisations - all available Free to download. Share your work with over 80 000 development practitioners.’ - Gale - Primary Source Microfilm
Microfilm archive, 40 years old. Fee-based. - HighBeam Research - Search Engines
Search 3 000+ sources. - LexisNexis
Legal, business, news. Fee-based. - Ovid
Medical & scientific. Fee-based. - ScienceDirect :
- ScienceDirect Info
- ScienceDirect Journals
- STN International
Science & technology. Fee-based.
Education
See the Education Search Engines Page for this area.
Graphics
- Clipart
- Ditto
- Iconlook
- Image & Sound Databases
- Google Images
- LIFE Photo Archive
‘Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today.’ - Pixsy
‘Visual search.’ Said to have more than 1 million pictures in a range of topics. - Yotophoto
‘The first internet search engine for finding free-to-use photographs and images.’
Journals, Documents & Magazines
- DocJax
‘Search engine for documents, which allow you to search documents and e-books from everywhere, preview them, even download them for free.’ - FindArticles.com
Subject or alphabetical listing. - MagPortal.com
Magazine Article Search Engine, Directory, Data Feeds. - Virtual Technical Reports Centre
ePrints, Preprints, Technical Reports.
Legal Matters
- FindLaw LawCrawler
Primarily US. - LawRunner Australia : A Legal Research Tool
- The Guide to Law Online
International, other national, US law. - World Legal Information Institute
400+ databases from 50+ countries.
Media
- AOL Video
- Blinkx
‘The world’s largest and most advanced video search engine.’ - Everyzing
Audio & Video. - Fagan Finder
Multimedia. - FindSounds
- Medusa
Music, images, movies, programs. - Radio-Locator
‘Links to over 10 000 radio station web pages and over 2 500 audio streams from radio stations in the U.S. and around the world.’ - The Internet Movie Database
- TVLink
‘Film & Television Website Archive. Hundreds of entertainment industry weblinks.’
Medical
News
- 1st Headlines
- eNewswires
- Excite News Tracker
- Moreover News Portal
Also Australian resources. - News Index
- News Now
- TotalNEWS
‘All the News, on the Net, all the Time.’ - World News
Search - general, geographic areas, topics, special reports.
PDF Documents
- Clickerado
‘Summarized documents in Adobe PDF format on the World Wide Web.’ - PDF Database
More than 12 million files claimed. Access PDF, Word files, or both. - Pdfgeni
Simpler process, clearer listing than above [title usually provided, not just url], some come as summaries, others as full documents. - PDF Search Engine
Search for PDF ebooks.
Politics & Government
- Australian Government Information
- Sipri FIRST
International relations & security. - SearchSystems.net
The Largest Public Records Directory. Not only the US in detail, but also international countries including Australia. More than 40 000 searchable public record databases. For a specific American [US] search engine use Pretrieve.
Social/Vertical Search Engines
- Eurekster
‘Eurekster created the Swicki platform which allows web publishers to build community-driven social search engines, called swickis that aggregate information on particular topics from any site of their choice for use on their websites.’ - Grokker
‘Web-based enterprise search management platform that leverages the power of federated content access and visualisation ’
Sciences, The
- AGRIGATE
Australian Agricultural information & resources. - Citeseerx
‘Scientific Literature Digital Library and Search Engine.’ Search by document, author. Also has citation information. - E-print Network
Research Communications for Scientists & Engineers. - Information Bridge
Full-text scientific and technical reports. - Mathematics
- Science Accelerator
‘Searches science, including R & D results, project descriptions, accomplishments, more.’ - Scirus - for Scientific Information
Sport
- AardvarkSport
20 000+ sport sites. - SPORTQuest
Sport Search Engine and Directory.
Travel
- Dohop
‘Searches 660+ airlines around the world for best flights, connections’. - Expedia
All aspects of travel from and within Australia.
World, The
- Earth Navigator
World countries. - USGS Search Engine
‘Reliable scientific information to describe and understand the Earth.’
Others
- Search Engines & Specialized Directories
Extensive listing broken into groups such as Ask a Question and Web Archives. - Fact200
‘Both an Internet search client and a news feed reader that concentrates on finding, sifting, and browsing information while filtering out noise and junk. Ideal for browsing massive amounts of web pages [e.g., browsing news feeds] or researching esoteric subjects.’ - Free Bibliographies …
And Bibliographic Databases on the Web. - FreePatentsOnline
‘One of the most powerful, fastest and easiest patent search engines on the web. Advanced search techniques such as word stemming, proximity searching, relevancy ranking and search term weighting to help you find exactly what you are looking for.’ - Galaxy - Directory
- Kinderstart
Because kids don’t come with instructions ! ‘The largest [and most popular] indexed directory and search engine focused on children zero to seven on the net.’ - Mangle Random Link Generator
- OAIster
‘Union catalog of digital resources. We provide access to these digital resources by harvesting their descriptive metadata.’ - Searchme
‘Let’s you see what you’re searching for. As you start typing, categories appear that relate to your query. Choose a category and you’ll see pictures of web pages that answer your search.’ - Teldir
Online phone books. - World Brain Book
‘We are a dictionary of human knowledge - occupations, sports, hobbies - interests, experiences, achievements.’