Pandia's 17 recommendations for Net searching
An Extreme Searcher's Guide to the Best of the Web by Chris Sherman, Associate Editor,
SearchEngineWatch, February 11, 2004.
"One of the world's foremost super searchers has distilled his extensive and wide-ranging knowledge into an essential guide to the web's highest quality resources.
The Extreme Searcher's Internet Handbook, by Randolph Hock, is both a compendium of high quality web sites, and a treasure trove of tips and tricks for finding information online. Subtitled 'A Guide for the Serious Searcher,' the book is an excellent follow-on to Ran's previous book, The Extreme Searcher's Guide to Web Search Engines."
Kids Search Engines by Danny Sullivan, Editor,
SearchEngine Watch, February 25, 2004.
"The services below are designed primarily to serve the needs of children, either in focus, or by filtering out sites that some parents and teachers might find inappropriate for kids. These usually include sites that deal with explicit sexual matters, porn sites, violence, hate speech, gambling and drug use."
In Search Of The Relevancy Figure by Danny Sullivan,
SearchEngineWatch Editor, December 5, 2002.
Watch for an updated article from Danny in the next few weeks!
Fagan Finder // search engines, reference, tools, and more
"Fagan Finder is a website designed as a tool, to help people find things, and it is meant to be a gateway to the Internet, a quality home page. Compare this to several websites. Like a search engine, we have searching capability, but we have many different searches. Like an exclusive directory, we include searching to or links only to high quality websites. Like a guide, we try to help you in your search experience.
Fagan Finder is the sole creation of Michael Fagan, a student in the Science and Business program at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada."
The Extreme Searcher's Web Page from Ran Hock.
Updates/links to sites included in his two highly-recommended books:
The Extreme Searcher's Internet Handbook & The Extreme Searcher's Guide to Web Search Engines
Critical Thinking and the Internet: from Deborah Wills, Reference/Collections Librarian, Wilfrid Laurier University Library.
"While the variable quality of Internet resources complicates the research process, the Internet can also function as a rich source of raw material for critical thinking. The following links are suggested sources for teaching critical thinking as well as for demonstrating the importance and complexity of evaluating Internet resources." Great example links!
Search Engine Showdown: The Users' Guide to Web Searching, an award-winning site by Greg R. Notess
Check out the Feature Chart; also find search strategies, analysis, reviews, news and articles.
Useful Sites (in alphabetical order)
AskOxford.com
Contains a dictionary and thesaurus as well as quotations and a word of the day.
Glossarist.com.
"a searchable and categorised directory of glossaries and topical dictionaries."
Internet Archive: Wayback Machine: "Browse through 30 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available."
Last Words: A collection of famous last words, epitaphs, obituaries, farewells, and last stands.
NationMaster.com - Where Stats Come Alive!
"If you have ever wanted to look up any number of national statistics, the Nation Master Web site is an excellent resource for finding out any number of current details about just about any country in the world. Currently, Nation Master has 335 statistical data sets, ranging from library books, forested land, Internet users, and airports. For easy reference, the main Web page features the most frequently requested stats, such as televisions and military expenditures per capita. Nation Master also allows visitors the option of creating their own graphs in order to effectively compare different nations. The site also has links to national profiles, which include the available statistics for each country, and images of the country's flag and a political map. Additionally, the site has a search engine, and a place where visitors can read short facts on the different countries. Apart from being interesting to browse through, the site will be helpful for students looking for basic statistics on the world's different countries."
The Scout Report
purportal.com: the bunk stops here: research scams, hoaxes, fraud, and urban legends.
Translation Wizard (beta) || Fagan Finder
"The Translation Wizard is a tool which connects you directly to online translation tools. Fagan Finder itself does not contain these translation tools. Instead, it includes a listing of many translation tools, each of which has different language and translation capabilities. It matches up the translation you want with a tool that can handle it. Try it out to see for yourself. Enter text (or a website), select the source and destination languages, and click the translate button."
Wikipedia
"February 25, 2004 (The Internet): Wikipedia (Wikipedia.org), a volunteer-created, multi-language encyclopedia, announced today that the project has reached a milestone of 500,000 articles, spread across 50 different languages."
Webopedia: Online Dictionary for Computer and Internet Terms
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I'm
Susan Herzog, Information Literacy Librarian at
Eastern Connecticut State University. I'm starting this blog as part of my presentation,
Driver's Ed for the Information Superhighway, at the 2004
Teaching Academic Survival Skills Conference.
There's so much data smog about websearch that the easiest way to keep current is to
Blog it.
