Research Skills: Go beyond Google

Go beyond Google

Google can be very useful, but there are many other tools on the internet that will help you to find useful information resources.

Explore this page to find out about:

• Other search engines
• Open Access Directories and Repositories
• How the Senior Library can help

There are powerful search options other than Google. Please see the list below for an introduction to searching beyond Google:

• DuckDuckGo (DDG) is an Internet search engine that emphasizes protecting searchers' privacy and avoiding the filter bubble of personalized search results.
• Google Books is a service from Google that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text , and stored in its digital database. 
• Google Scholar is a separate search tool created by Google. It is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. The Google Scholar index includes most peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents.
• Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine or answer engine. It is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from externally sourced curated data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine might.

For a comprehensive list of other search engines, click here. 

There are a number of excellent free directories and repositories of open-access journals, images, and other materials. A comprehensive list is available here; see below for highlights:

The Directory of Open Access Journals is a useful source of scholarly journal articles, providing access to quality controlled Open Access Journals.

The Digital Public Library of America has images, texts, videos, and other archival materials from museums and libraries all over America. 

arXiv offers access to e-prints in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics.

CORE is the world’s largest collection of open access research papers. 

PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine.

If you cannot find many information resources for your topic, Speak to a librarian in the Study Zone, they can:

• help you check and improve your search terms 
• offer advise on where to look for the best resources in your subject area
• confirm whether there are enough good resources for your topic
• help you access and search databases for articles on your topic
• help you borrow books and other resources from the National Library Board
• check that you have searched all the best places