Collected here are a variety of search engines for searching the Internet. Basic search engines try to search all the web, and they frequently give search results which are unsorted or unfiltered, resulting in inconsequential hits, such as dead links. Metasearchers run a simultaneous search using several search engines and rank the results. Specialized search engines search a specific part of the internet. Sometimes, these are search engines that are part of a basic search engine.

To see useful links we've selected for learning about NASA or other topics, see our Browse topics and our bibliographies. If you are having trouble finding a NASA website, you can request assistance. Registered Library Patrons can also request assistance in any work-related web research and can request training in advanced internet searching techniques.

Basic

Bing

 

Google

 

Yahoo

Metasearchers

Dogpile

 

Excite

 

Metacrawler

 

Mamma

 

Search.com

 

WebCrawler

Specialized

ABYZ News Links - Catalog of links to newspapers, news media, and news sources arranged by country.

 

The CyberCemetery - Creates permanent links to websites and publications of defunct U.S. government agencies and commissions. A partnership between GPO and the University of North Texas Libraries.

 

Electronic Preprints - Catalog of web sites offering electronic preprints of journal articles. Compiled by Goddard Space Flight Center Library.

 

E-print Network - "Searchable gateway that provides access to preprint servers from around the world...Links to 18,000 servers in 35 countries housing 650,000 documents."

 

FindHow - A specialized site that links to different sites that answer questions ranging from the mundane (how do I inspect my car's transmission oil pan) to the esoteric (how can I tell that this stone is a meteorite).

 

Google Scholar - Specialized search engine that searches for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. An Advanced Search option is also available.

 

Infomine: Scholarly Internet Resources Collections - "INFOMINE is a virtual library of Internet resources relevent to faculty, students and research staff at the university level. It contains useful Internet resources such as databases, electronic journals, electronic books, bulletin boards, mailing lists, online library card catalogs, articles, directories of researchers and many other types of information."

 

Internet Archive - Also called the Wayback Machine, it is a specialized search engine that searches an archive of old web pages and out of copyright materials. The Archive also hosts NASA's collection of online images and other mulitmedia at NASA Images.

 

Internet Public Library - Catalog of reputable sources selected by the University of Michigan School of Information.

 

Science.gov - "Science.gov searches over 50 databases and over 2100 selected websites from 13 federal agencies, offering 200 million pages of authoritative U.S. government science information including research and development results."

 

Scirus - Specialized search engine that covers only scientific web pages and articles.

 

Search NASA

 

USA.gov - Specialized search engine that searches only United States government sites. It is the official gateway to all U.S. government information.

 

The WWW Virtual Library - Link catalog of reference sites worldwide selected by volunteer subject experts. This is the oldest catalog of the web and was started by Tim Berners-Lee, the creater of HTML.