Vertical Search Engines

A vertical search engine searches a specific industry, topic, type of content (e.g., travel, movies, images, blogs, live events), piece of data, geographical location, and so on. It may help to think of vertical search as a search for a particular niche. Some of this content cannot be found, or is difficult to find, on general search engines. For this reason, the topic of vertical search is closely related to that of the deep Web. Be sure to visit the tutorial on The Deep Web for a fuller discussion of this topic.
To find a vertical search engine, you can use a general search engine and try to find a search site dedicated to a particular type of content, for example medical search, job search, and so on.

When to use a vertical search engine

• When your topic is focused on a specific topic, industry, content type, geographical location, language, etc.
• When you're having difficulty locating what you want on general, meta, or concept categorizing search engines

A few examples of vertical search engines

There are so many example out there on so many topics - it's endless! This page will list just a very few. Notice how some cover broad topics while others are of narrower interest.
Topical search engines

~ MedNar and PubMed
~ ScienceResearch.com and World Wide Science

Industry search engines

~ BizNar, the world of business
~ Industry Search, a search for industrial supplies limited to Australia and New Zealand
~ PaperPundit, searching the pulp and paper industry created with Google Custom Search
~ Stock Screener from Yahoo!

Image search engines

~ Picsearch
~ Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog
tip! A good source for more of these tools can be found in a 2008 posting on the ReadWriteWeb blog, Digital Image Resources on the Deep Web.

News search engines

~ Alltop
~ NewsNow

Blog search engines

~ Google Blog Search
~ Technorati

Full text books and articles

~ Google Book Search
~ Google Scholar
~ The Online Books Page
~ Project Gutenberg

Social Web real time search

~ Twitter Search and Twitscoop for Twitter content
~ FriendFeed Search for social networking activities

Concept Categorizing Search Engines

A concept categorizing search engine organizes results into topical categories or concepts. These concepts are derived from the contents of your search results. This arrangement may be thought of as a horizontal layout of results, in contrast to a single, vertical list of results that you find on such search engines as Google. Most concept processing engines also offer a vertical list of results. The concept categories are an added bonus.
When you encounter concept categories, you can first review them to determine if the results are relevant to your search. If not, you can try another search. Or perhaps your results are fine, but the categories themselves could be better! If the categories look useful, you can select the ones of interest and examine their contents. Concept categories can also help you learn about your topic.
There aren't as many concept categorizing search engines as there once were. This is a shame, because this type of search engine can be very helpful to your research.

When to use a concept categorizing search engine

• When your search is a general one and you want to learn about the component concepts of your topic
• When you know very little about your topic and want help in identifying its scope and content
• When your topic is obscure
• When you are having trouble finding what you want when scanning a single list of search results

Examples of a concept categorizing search engine

Here is an example of concepts retrieved from a Quintura search on "global warming" on Quintura. The concepts are laid out in a tag cloud, very popular on the Web these days.

Subject Directories & Encyclopedias

http://www.internettutorials.net/subject.asp

Meta Search Engines

• 43 Marks - offers separate searches of Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Wikipedia with a one-click toggle between search results; also serves as a personal home page for collecting bookmarks
• Browsys - offers Search Assistant for searching numerous sources including the social and the deep Web; Virtual Folders allow users to create, save and bookmark custom folders containing up to 12 favorite sites
• Cacti Search - search Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask, and retrive a collated results list with an option to view results from each engine separately
• Dogpile - search numerous search engines and presented collated results; also presents concept clusters for viewing results organized by keywords or topics
• iBoogie - offers searches of the Web and multimedia, and supplies real-time concept clustering of results
• Ixquick - ranks results based on top ten rankings from the source search engines; offers substantial privacy protection to searchers
• Mamma - retrieve results from numerous sources; also offers search suggestions related to your search
• MetaCrawler - retrieve results from Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask; also offers search suggestions related to your search
• Searchzooka - offers advanced search options on Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask, Digg and Technorati with a single mouse click; users can save searches for future use, organize the searches into folders, and clone new searches from existing ones
• Virtual Learning Resources Center - searches several high quality directories; also offers its own directory
• ZapMeta - searches a handful of sources, and offers concept clusters for organizing search results
• Zuula - searches the Web, images, news, blogs and jobs postings, and returns results from multiple search tools in configurable separate tabs

General Search Engines

• Alexa Web Search - analyzes site traffic including ranking, global users, pages linking to the site, and links to related pages of interest
• Ask.com - general search engine enhanced by a number of specialty searches including images, news and video; search results show related searches and popular questions and answers
• Bing - Microsoft engine that displays excerpts from sites retrieved by your search and offers related search suggestions; multimedia and other deep Web results are also displayed. Also check out Bing Maps.
• Blekko - retrieves results from trustworthy sites and offers filtered searching with the use of slash tags, e.g., global warming /climate; can sort results by relevance or date; allows searchers to integrate their Facebook "likes" into search results
• ChaCha - offers live human guides to help answer queries; accepts queries from mobile devices
• DuckDuckGo - offers results from content-rich sites, displays "zero-click" answers at the top of the search result page, and features numerous search options and site settings; offers unusual search privacy
• Exalead - offers thumbnail images of retrieved sites, and organization of results by type of site, file type, language and country
• Factbites - searches for full topic matches and returns meaningful, full sentence excerpts from sites in its results list; offers related searches
• Google - Web's most popular search engine. Also check out EcoSmartSearch.com, a Google-powered search engine with a black background display that saves energy. Google offers a number of Services that are worth exploring, including:
• Google Blog Search, for searching blog entries
• Google Book Search, for searching the full text of books from most publishers in the U.S.
• Google Scholar, offers the full text, abstracts, and/or citations to scholarly materials including books, journal articles, documents in academic repositories and the free Web. This link will allow you to access the full text of articles in journals to which the Libraries subscribe when you are off campus.
• Google U.S. Government Search, a searchable database of U.S. government Web sites (.gov and .mil) ranked by link popularity
• Hakia - organizes results into types of information sources, including "credible " sites recommended by librarians and news, blogs and Twitter
• iSEEK Education - offers authoritative resources from university, government, and established noncommercial providers; organizes results into concept clusters, and also allows users to recommend and rate sites
• Lycos - general search engine that also offers searches of a few deep Web content sources including people look-up, yellow pages, and multimedia
• Quintura - displays a tag cloud with keywords related to your search that can be selected to generate new results
• SearchEdu.com - service that limits results to the .edu, domain; also offers to search well-known dictionaries, encyclopedias, almanacs, etc. See also:
• SearchGov.com - .gov domain
• SearchMil.com - .mil domain
• SearchTeam - real-time collaborative search engine that allows you to search, save results, and collaborate with invited others; you can comment, chat, share documents and links, etc. to create a useful SearchSpace on any topic; integrates with such social networks as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter
• SimilarPages.com - search by keyword or website address and retrieve a focused list of related sites; offers a Firefox Add-On that displayst a list of up to 300 sites similar to the one you are currently viewing along with other features
• SnappyFingers - searches millions of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) for answers to user queries; displays excerpts from the retrieved material
• Wolfram|Alpha - enter a question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and own collection of data to compute the answer
• Yahoo! - portal with a general Web search and many other content services; the search feature uses the Bing index and offers the Axis app for visual results
• Zanran - searches for data and statistics found in graphs, tables and charts; hover your mouse over the item icon for a preview

A Cloudy Forecast for Libraries

http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/sep11/Breeding.shtml

Records Management As a Career for Librarians

http://ala-apa.org/newsletter/2006/04/18/records-management-as-a-career-for-librarians/

Report: Facebook Considers Granting Access to Children Under 13

http://techland.time.com/2012/06/04/report-facebook-considers-granting-access-to-children-under-13/?iid=tl-main-feature

Microsoft’s E3: A Tale of Two Xboxes

http://techland.time.com/2012/06/04/microsofts-e3-a-tale-of-two-xboxes/