Get Help from Experts
Where to search when ...
"I need authoritative sites chosen by an expert researcher."
"I need personal help from experts."
"I need authoritative sites chosen by an expert researcher."
Search guides (topic pathfinders) created by librarians from all over the world
"I need personal help from experts."
Live Online Reference - Ask WA
Ask-WA provides access to a live librarian, 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week, to every Washington State resident. Get useful answers to your questions, based on credible resources, from the best information experts around. Provided by the Kitsap Regional Library.
Ask a Librarian - Library of Congress
Have a question? Need assistance? Fill out an online form to get help from a Library of Congress librarian. Online chat is available for questions on digital reference, newspapers, and periodicals.
Search Engines, Repositories, & Directories
Power Searching
This page gives suggestions for effective Internet searching using:
Google is obviously one of the best known search engines, but are you making full use of all the features Google offers? Find out more about how Google can be used from these help pages from Google Support:
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Using Search Operators, Punctuation, and Symbols to Get More Specific Search Results
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Finding Images, Videos, and Text That You Have Permission to Use
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Understanding the Different Parts of the Google Search Results Page
Try using Advanced Search in Google to improve the relevancy of the results you get:
Try these specific searches in Google:
Search the latest index of the world's books. Find millions of great books you can preview or read for free.
Satellite imagery, maps, and other geographic information allows you to view exotic locales like Maui and Paris, as well as points of interest such as local restaurants, hospitals, hotels, and schools. With Google Earth you can fly from space to your neighborhood--just type in an address and zoom right in, search for schools, parks, restaurants, and hotels. Get driving directions, tilt and rotate the view to see 3D terrain and buildings, save and share your searches and favorites.
Find local businesses, view maps and get driving directions. Google Maps has It offers satellite imagery, street maps, 360° panoramic views of streets, real-time traffic conditions, and route planning for traveling by foot, car, bicycle, or public transportation.
Aggregates headlines from more than 4,500 English-language news sources worldwide, groups similar stories together and displays them according to each reader's personalized interests.
Search for scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.
Search millions of videos from across the web.
Search Engines
Search engines are programs that search documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found. Web search engines, like Google, Bing and Yahoo!, enable users to search for documents on the Internet.
Typically, web search engines work by sending out a spider to fetch as many documents as possible. Another program, called an indexer, then reads these documents and creates an index based on the words contained in each document. Each search engine uses a proprietary algorithm to create its indices such that, ideally, only meaningful results are returned for each query.
A search engine focused on answering questions - personal and professional, easy and difficult, silly and serious. At the best information from the web.
Bing search results are designed to be as accurate as possible. Users can narrow results to a specific region, country, or language. Other features include an image search, video search, news, maps, and a translator.
A search engine that does not track users or collect their personal information. Search for images, news, and places, and use 'Instant Answers' and '!Bang' for quick results to queries.
Use Yahoo! to find relevant information, video, images, and answers from all across the Web.
Metasearch engines
Meta search engines are search engine tools that pass queries on to many other search engines and/or directories and then summarize all the results in one handy interface.
Dogpile returns all the best results from leading search engines. Dogpile looks at all of them, decides which are most relevant to your search, eliminates duplicates and reveals them to you.
Use Ixquick to search anonymously. Ixquick provides search results from over ten of the best search engines in full privacy.
Yippy queries several top search engines, combines the results, and generates an ordered list based on comparative ranking. groups similar results together into “clouds.” This can help you see your search results by topic so you can zero in on exactly what you’re looking for or
discover unexpected relationships between items.
Repositories
A web repository is a central place in which an aggregation of data is kept and maintained in an organized way.
This service, based on the Google Custom Search engine, lets you search the contents of the repositories listed in OpenDOAR for freely available academic research information.
Search Directories
A search directory is a website in which links to information are organized by subject, and in alphabetical order, to make it easier for users to find the information they're seeking.
Directory of Open Access Journals
An online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals - over 10,000 journals (over 6,500 searchable at the article level), from 134 countries.
