The right tool?

There is no doubt that Google, the world’s most popular search engine, offers some excellent search features. But there is a consensus that Google is not so effective at finding subject-based information. It may boast the largest online index around, but it indexes only the first 100K of a document. In fact, less than half the searchable web is fully searchable in Google. So for subject-based searches, you might want to explore some of the specialist alternatives.

Business
Top-ranked by Google, Yahoo and Windows Live for “international business search”, Masterseek (www.masterseek.co.uk) claims to be “the world’s largest and most comprehensive B2B search engine that establishes contact between buyers and suppliers worldwide”. Masterseek provides free access to corporate profiles, contact information and descriptions of products and services from more than 45 million companies in 75 countries. Information is gathered by specially developed web crawlers that automatically and continually search thousands of company websites.

Kellysearch (www.kellysearch.co.uk) regards itself as “different from the general purpose search engines as it lists only manufacturers or suppliers of B2B products, not retail or consumer goods.” It allows targeted searches across an extensive list of headings to identify the specific product or service required. The company name search permits users to contact a new supplier or confirm details of known suppliers without having to register or take out a subscription.

News
Yahoo News (news.yahoo.com), CNN (www.cnn.com) and MSNBC Digital Network (www.msnbc.msn.com) are currently battling it out to be the world’s leading news provider. Audiences regularly top 36 million.

Another worth exploring is Newslookup (www.newslookup.co.uk). It trawls several thousand leading news media sites and claims to be “the only news search engine that provides a snapshot look of news websites throughout the world”. Users can search and display results by document parts, including document body, meta keywords and meta description.

Science and Technology
Scirus (www.scirus.com) is the most comprehensive scientific research tool on the web. With over 450 million scientific items indexed to date, it allows you to search for journal content, scientists’ home pages, courseware, pre-print server material, patents and institutional repository and website information. The Web Marketing Association gave Scirus its Best Directory or Search Engine Website Award from 2004 to 2006.

For engineering, computing and mathematics resources, TechXtra (www.techxtra.ac.uk) could be fruitful. Many of the things you’ll find through TechXtra come from the “hidden web” and are not indexed by Google. You can find articles, books, websites, industry news, job announcements, technical reports, technical data, full-text e-prints, research, theses and dissertations, and teaching and learning resources.

Medicine and Health
SearchMedica (www.searchmedica.co.uk) is a dedicated medical search engine for healthcare professionals and students that houses hundreds of handpicked sites, chosen by health professionals for their usefulness. SearchMedica lists leading medical organisations in the UK, US, Australasia and Europe, vetted UK-based patient information websites, relevant journals and other authoritative websites. An independent online survey of GPs conducted by Medix-UK in 2006 found that 69% prefer SearchMedica to Google.

Formerly known as Omni, Intute (www.intute.ac.uk/healthandlifesciences) offers education and research resources through a network of UK universities and partners. Subject specialists select, evaluate and describe the sites listed. It includes gateways for medicine, nursing, midwifery and allied health resources and the Newsround news aggregation service, which brings together “subject-based newsfeeds from across the internet and presents them in a single searchable interface”. Social science pages (www.intute.ac.uk/socialsciences) are also available.

Literature
For full-text books, try Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org), the first producer of free electronic books. There are currently over 25,000 free full-text books in the catalogue.

Google Book (books.google.com) offers some interesting features. If a book is out of copyright or a publisher has given permission, you can see a preview and in some cases the full text. If it’s in the public domain you can download a PDF copy.

There are also Buy This Book and Borrow This Book options, linking to sellers and libraries.

Last but not least, Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk) allows users to browse, search for and buy specific items including books and multimedia products by subject area.

Quick answer guides
When you have a specific question that requires a quick answer, there is a range of niche engines to choose from. Answers (www.answers.com) offers access to millions of topics from the world’s leading publishers, and AskMeKnow (www.askmeknow.com) can do a quick Wikipedia search from your mobile phone.

Search engine comparison services
Though all search engines offer standard features, there may be noticeable variations in coverage and algorithms for sorting results. For example, unlike Google, Yahoo supports all Boolean operators, offers region search, and indexes the first 500K of a document, compared with Google’s 100K.

Launched in July, new contender Cuil (www.cuil.com) claims it can index, faster and cheaper, a far larger portion of the web than Google.

For systematic comparison, GrabAll (www.graball.com) and Thumbshots Ranking (ranking.thumbshots.com) simultaneously present results from multiple leading search engines. Users can select which engines they want compared and displayed.

If you require a specific format, GrabAll allows you to select the engines you want to search for web, image, map, audio and video.

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