Web search

The sites on this page are a selection of useful web search tools. They should be regarded as supplementary to the subscribed resources offered by the University. We recommend that you always search within the UL Electronic Resources portal at http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/eresources/index.php.

Page contents

1. General web search engines
2. Academic search (bibliographic, repositories, ejournals)
3. ‘Universal’ UK academic library catalogue searches
4. Online ebook search engines
5. Secondhand/cheap/out of print book search engines
6. Online map search
7. Video search engines
8. ‘Real-time’ search engines, plus weblog and social search
9. Alert services

General web search

• Google http://www.google.co.uk/ Google probably has the widest coverage of any general web search engine. Google also offers many specialised search engines, some listed below.
• Bing http://www.bing.com/ Microsoft’s web search engine which, some say, is improving and matching Google in many areas.
• Exalead http://www.exalead.co.uk/  European based search engine which is highly thought of.
• Clusty http://clusty.com/ Search results grouped into facets or clusters of similarity.
• Search Me http://www.searchme.com – interesting results preview screen.
  Gigablast http://www.gigablast.com/
• DeepDyve http://www.deepdyve.com ’Deep web’ (or ‘invisible web’) search. The deep web is around 500 times greater than the visible web (the visible web was, in March 2009, estimated at 177 terabytes out of 91,000 terabytes for the whole web).
• Turbo10 http://turbo10.com/ Another ‘deep web’ search
• WolframAlpha http://www.wolframalpha.com It’s not really a search engine as we know it, but a ‘computational knowledge engine’ or a mathematical web application using curated data from the web and elsewhere. An interesting tool but not so intuitive in use.
• Google squared http://www.google.com/squared/ A Google Labs work in progress with which it is possible to create tables of statistical information from numerous web sources. A bit hit and miss.
• Deeper Web http://www.deeperweb.com Sorts Google search results into groups by source and type of information. Also offers plugins for IE and Firefox browsers.
• Europeana http://www.europeana.eu/portal/ Site includes over 4.6 million digital items culled from over 100 European institutions, including the National Archives of Finland, the European Archive, the Louvre, and the Slovak National Gallery.

Academic web search (bibliographic, repositories, ejournals)

• Scopus http://www.scopus.com Possibly the most comprehensive bibliographic search engine available. Owned by publishers Elsevier.(NOTE: University subscribed subscription only service – off campus access via Raven password) 17,500 peer-reviewed journal titles fully indexed in total from 1996, abstracts only pre 1996 (ie. no citation info or full text search). Also conference papers, web pages, patent records, etc. See Scopus’ content coverage guide.
• Web of Knowledge/Web of Science http://www.isiknowledge.com/ Another major bibliographic search engine which has been given a new look (April 2011) (NOTE: University subscribed subscription only service – off campus access via Raven password)
• PubMed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed A freely accessible (but academically excellent) digital repository and bibliographic search engine of over 20 million records from peer-reviewed biomedical and life sciences journal literature. PubMed is run by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). Also there is PubMed Central, a subset of PubMed, with ~2 million full text records (12% are open access).
• Guide to finding stuff on your reading list http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/department/library/handouts/Finding_refs_2010_gens_%20postgrads.pdf A good clear guide to searching and making use of the many electronic resources offered by the University. Produced in October 2010 for Genetics postgraduates by the University’s Plant Sciences Library but equally applicable to most other subjects and undergraduates as well!
• Google Scholar http://scholar.google.co.uk Google’s ‘scholarly’ or academic search engine. When accessing on-campus, results available through UL Electronic Resources are highlighted. Citing information may not be accurate. We do not advise paying to access a research paper found through Google Scholar – please check with the Library first.
• Microsoft Academic Search http://academic.research.microsoft.com/ from Microsoft Research ‘in beta’—interesting and improving, may not have the coverage of Google Scholar but is attempting to provide more accurate and consistent citation information. See Microsoft Academic Search (Beta) appears ready to expand database coverage (March 2011). With its latest improvements some are now saying ‘Look out Google Scholar’!
• A short guide to free academic search http://jurnsearch.wordpress.com/a-short-guide-to-academic-search/ a regularly updated list from JURN (a search-engine dedicated to indexing free ‘open access’ ejournals in the arts and humanities).
• OAIster http://oaister.worldcat.org/ Open Archive Intiative search engine covering items in thousands of academic open archives of research material. Note that the archives are open but the items stored in them may not be. OAIster is now owned by OCLC as a freely accessible database available within WorldCat.
• BASE http://www.base-search.net/ Bielefeld Academic Search Engine—another open archives search engine. ‘BASE is one of the biggest OAI-Search-Engines and includes some 28 million documents originating from more than 1,780 repository servers’
• Driver http://www.driver-community.eu/ search for academic research in European Open Access scientific publications.
• Scirus http://www.scirus.com/ Publisher Elsevier’s free to use but excellent science biased search engine for peer-reviewed research.
• UK Institutional Repository Search http://irs.mimas.ac.uk/demonstrator/
• Open data catalogs http://datacatalogs.org/ ‘DataCatalogs.org aims to be the most comprehensive list of open data catalogs in the world.’
• DOI and DOI Resolver (Digital Object Identifier) http://dx.doi.org/or  http://www.crossref.org/ and see about DOIs and our own DOI page. The DOI is designed to be a perpetual identifier to a research paper or (now) book or book chapter. Unlike web links, the DOI should not fail over time. See more about DOIs on our DOI page on how to use them. The DOI has very recently (May 2012) been made an official ISO Standard: ISO 26324:2012. Other ISO Standard referencing schemes include ISBN (International Standard Book Number), ISSN (International Standard Serial Number for journals), and Dublin Core (a standard minimum set of metadata to indentify documents).
• EThOS http://ethos.bl.uk/ Electronic Theses Online Service—‘search across 250,000+ theses from 90+ higher education institutions and order full text quickly and easily’ (Free registration required). Note: theses from Cambridge and Oxford are not available—although they are listed—on EThOS. See http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/electronicresources/theses.php
• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) http://www.doaj.org/  Information about and links to almost 7,000 academic open access peer reviewed journals.
• Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) http://www.doabooks.org/ New (April 2012) directory launching with 756 academic peer-reviewed books from 22 publishers.
• OpenJ-Gate http://www.openj-gate.org/ Indexes articles from 7,300+ open access journals of which 4,300+ are peer reviewed.
• JURN http://www.jurn.org/ Search 3,600+ open access scholarly ejournals in the arts & humanities. The JURN Directory lists the 2,300+ English language titles by subject. This is developing into an interesting site for non-scientific open access material.
• BioMed Central http://www.biomedcentral.com/ Open access journal publisher specialising in bioscience journals (owned by Springer).
• PhysMath Central http://www.physmathcentral.com/  Open access journal publisher specialising in physics and mathematics journals (owned by Springer).
• Chemistry Central http://www.chemistrycentral.com/  Open access journal publisher specialising in chemistry journals (owned by Springer).
• SpringerOpen http://www.springeropen.com/ New open access journal publisher to cover all Scientific/Technical/Medical subjects.
• Public Library of Science (PLoS) http://www.plos.org/ Open access journal publisher specialising in science journals.
• Open Access Journals Search Engine http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=005943177783402775348%3A0jxffbisbzk A Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) which searches in Open Access Journals covering almost all subject areas from humanities to pure sciences.
• Open Biology http://rsob.royalsocietypublishing.org/ First open access journal from the Royal Society
• OpenDOAR http://www.opendoar.org/ Directory of Open Access Repositories, now listing over 1,5oo repositories [Oct2009]
• OpenDOAR search http://www.opendoar.org/search.php Uses a Google Custom Search Engine to search for the full-text of material held in open access repositories listed in the Directory.
• Open Access Directory http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Main_Page a wiki full of data on open access including directories of data and disciplinary repositories.
• CiteSeer http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/ ‘a scientific literature digital library and search engine that focuses primarily on the literature in computer and information science.’
• OJOSE - Online Journals Search Engine http://www.ojose.com/ ‘a free powerful scientific search engine enabling you to make search-queries in different databases by using only 1 search field. With OJOSE you can find, download or buy scientific publications (journals, articles, research reports, books, etc.) in up to 60 different databases.’ NB Never pay for any articles without first checking if they are freely available through the eresources@cambridge portal!
• ScienceResearch.com http://www.scienceresearch.com ‘real-time’ and ‘deep web’ scientific search: ‘free, publicly available deep web search engine that uses advanced federated search technology to return high quality results by submitting your search query – in real-time – to other well respected search engines then collating, ranking and dropping duplicates of the results.’
• PubGet http://www.pubget.com ‘Pubget indexes nearly 20 million life science research documents, including those in PubMed®. You search it by typing terms into the search field, a lot like you’d search PubMed or Google Scholar. The difference is Pubget gets you the PDF right away.’
• **REVISED** TicTOCs http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/ Journal Tables of Contents (TOCs)Service – keep up to date with contents of selected journals. Over 14,000 journal TOCs indexed. This service is to be closed end of March 2012. Refer to instructions on transferring to the similar JournalTOCs service.
• JournalTOCs http://www.journaltocs.hw.ac.uk/ Very similar to ticTOCs, but seems to be a more advanced service with more options. See this article. New look June 2011. ‘…the largest, free collection of scholarly journal Tables of Contents (TOCs): 16,461 journals (including 2,163 Open Access journals) from 843 publishers.’

‘Universal’ UK academic library catalogue searches

• Copac http://copac.ac.uk/ ‘Copac is a freely available library catalogue, giving access to the merged online catalogues of members of the Research Libraries UK (RLUK) as well as increasing numbers of specialist libraries.’
• SUNCAT http://www.suncat.ac.uk/ Serials Union Catalogue for the UK.  Serials’ holdings information from 80 UK academic libraries (including the British Library, the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, some large Higher Education institutions and a number of specialist libraries) plus the Cooperative Online Serials (CONSER) database, ISSN register, and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). NOTE: despite the login page, no login is necessary!
• SALSER http://edina.ac.uk/salser/ Serials catalogue for 11 Scottish academic and research libraries, the members of the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries (SCURL).

Ebook search

NOTE: These cover mostly out-of-copyright works. For recent in copyright textbooks and texts pre 1800 please check the UL’s ebooks@cambridge portal.

• ebooks@cambridge list of free ebook collections
• Google books http://books.google.co.uk/ Millions of books scanned by Google’s ongoing book scanning project. Out of copyright works available full text. Effectively a full text search engine of 15 million books—but note that only out of copyright works allow full text to be displayed or downloaded. (15 million books is estimated by Google to be over 11% of all books ever published).
• Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/ “Permanent free access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format [...] includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages”. Diditized texts repository, now hosts over 1.6 million titles.
• Digital Book Index http://www.digitalbookindex.org A search engine of digital book repositories (including Google books, Internet Archive, and many others). http://www.digitalbookindex.com/search001a.htm avoiding (free) registration
• HathiTrust http://www.hathitrust.org/ Contains over 8.8 million full text titles (but only 2.2m are in the public domain). The collection is projected to hit 14 million by the end of 2012. It is mostly composed of books scanned by Google for various American university libraries but is increasingly gaining new members and strives to vastly improve the standard of metadata offered about its books compared to the rather dismal level of Google Books. If Google decides to ‘give up’ in the face of the many legal challenges obstructing its course, it may be HathiTrust that becomes the leading ebook scanning project. Latest PDF report.
• Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) http://www.doabooks.org/ New (April 2012) directory launching with 756 academic peer-reviewed books from 22 publishers.
• Scribd http://www.scribd.com/ online books and all kinds of other documents—anyone can upload/download (requires free registration)
• The Open Library http://dev.openlibrary.org/ ‘A page for every book’: a publicly created and accessible online book catalogue with links to over 1 million full text works.
• BookServer http://www.archive.org/bookserver A preliminary version of new service from the Internet Archive intending to become a comprehensive catalogue of ebooks (free and paid for) in any format. Currently searching only the Open Library.
• The Online Books Page http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/archives.html A very comprehensive list of archives of ebooks on this page of the Online Books site.
• Feedbooks http://feedbooks.com/ ‘On Feedbooks you’ll discover thousands of public domain books and original books from new authors that you can read on any mobile device’.

Secondhand/out of print book search

• JustBooks/Bookfinder http://www.justbooks.co.uk/ Probably the most comprehensive new and secondhand book search engine.
• Abebooks http://www.abebooks.co.uk The best known web marketplace of secondhand book dealers worldwide - ‘if it’s not here, it doesn’t exist’. Listings are included in JustBooks above.
• Hive http://www.hive.co.uk/ new books online – support your local bookshops by buying through this site

Map search online

• Google maps http://maps.google.co.uk – also provides aerial/satellite images plus the excellent ’street view’ of most areas.
• Bing maps (Microsoft) http://maps.live.com – also provides aerial images plus ‘birds eye’ view for some areas (= aerial at an angle). Better satellite images than Google maps for some areas—try both. (Previously ‘Live maps’). Good feature: 1:25,000 and 1:50,000 Ordnance Survey maps at the appropriate magnifications.
• Multimap (owned by Microsoft) http://www.multimap.com Good for street maps and also offers Ordnance Survey maps at some scales. Uses Bing aerial images).
• Open Street Map http://www.openstreetmap.org/ Publicly created map made by contributors using GPS-equipped hardware. Free to use.
• People’s Map http://peoplesmap.com/ An ongoing publicly created map from aerial photos, but far from complete - free for private non-commercial use of maps. Free registration may be required.

Music

• Musopen http://www.musopen.com/ an online music library of copyright free (public domain) music.
• Naxos Music Library Full Naxos CD catalogue streamed at near CD audio quality. (NOTE: Subscription only subscribed resoruce provided by Homerton College Library—please ask for a password and weblink from our Librarian).
• Petrucci Music Library http://imslp.org/wiki/ Free sheet music: “a virtual library containing all public domain music scores, as well as scores from composers who are willing to share their music with the world without charge.”

Other

• Textmap http://www.textmap.com/
• Language learning http://universitiesandcolleges.org/language-learning-resources/ A  master list of free language learning resources including audio podcast courses.

Video search engines

• blinkx http://www.blinkx.com/ One of the most comprehensive video search sites
• Google video search http://video.google.co.uk Of course Google features here as everywhere else! Good for (eg.) finding Shakespeare productions freely viewable online
• VHX http://vhx.tv/ “VHX uses a brilliant, large display of high quality videos that you can easily “channel surf” with your keyboard. According to them, “VHX is the way you’re supposed to watch and share videos with friends. It brings online videos together into one streamlined watching experience and equips the community with the best possible curation tools.”

‘Real-time’ search engines plus weblog and other ‘social’ search

These come and go – but some may still be working. The traditional search engines are catching up on this area now.

• Collecta http://collecta.com/ real-time search engine
• Scoopler http://www.scoopler.com/ real-time search engine
• TweetMeme http://tweetmeme.com/ real-time search engine
• itpints http://www.itpints.com/ real-time search engine
• Google blog search http://blogsearch.google.co.uk
• Blogpulse http://www.blogpulse.com/
• Icerocket http://www.icerocket.com
• PostRank http://www.postrank.com/
• Twingly http://www.twingly.com
• Scoopler http://www.scoopler.com/ ‘Real time search’ – search results from Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Flickr, Identica etc… social applications in real-time, continuously updated on screen.
• Social Mention http://www.socialmention.com/ ‘Real time search platform’ – searches a large range of social web applications. “Think Google Alerts but for social media”.
• Twist http://www.twist.flaptor.com/ twitter trends
• Twahpic http://twahpic.msresearch.us/ A new way of looking at Twitter from Microsoft Research

Alert services

In addition to subscribing to RSS feeds (using, for instance, Google Reader), the following services are invaluable web monitors:

• Google alerts http://www.google.co.uk/alerts?hl=en Sends a daily email of news picked up on subjects you specify—be fairly specific in your search terms to get the most out of it.
• Google Scholar alerts http://scholar.google.co.uk/ Google’s academic search engine alerts service.
• Watch That Page http://www.watchthatpage.com/ Sends a daily email listing any changes to web pages you specify—especially useful for monitoring sites with no RSS feed.