East Carolina University
Department of Psychology

Search Engines

General Purpose Search Engines

Google -- very fast, clean, my favorite. Has cached pages.
Google-Scholar -- Restrict your search to scholarly literature.
Google-ECU -- Restrict your search to pages at East Carolina University.
Google-Specific University -- Restrict your search to pages at a particular university.
Google News Search -- search a variety of Internet news sources for articles appearing in the last week.
Yahoo Search -- For example, link:http://personal.ecu.edu/wuenschk/anosmia.htm
MS Bing

MetaSearch Engines

Ixquick -- lets you select which of 12 engines are employed.
Dogpile -- sort by relevance or by search engine.

Image Search Engines

Link Searching

Identify pages which are linking to the provided url. Google does NOT do a very good job of this, Yahoo Search does. As an example, I tried this search: link:http://personal.ecu.edu/wuenschk/anosmia.htm -- Google found 2 pages, Yahoo Search found 143. Google does provide some free services for webmasters, including link searches -- see www.google.com/webmasters/start .

Information on Search Engines

Search Engine Watch -- information on search engines for web masters and consumers

Google is so damn good that I almost never use any other search engine. Here are some tips on making Google even more useful.

Click on the preferences link and change the default way Google operates.
If you have been getting too many hits to pages in languages you do not read, select the "Search only for pages written in these languages" and then select the languages you want.
If you find that your search terms lead you to inappropriate sexually explicit pages, click on "Use strict filtering." I once searched for "how to spray paint a car" and all but one of the hits pointed to web pages that functioned as porno-redirectors - these pages have a bunch of common search target phrases, but you never see them because when you point there you are immediately redirected to multiple porn sites, which then immediately attempt to download scumware to your computer. Changing from the default filtering to strict filtering eliminated this problem for me.
Increase the number of results per page. The page will load slightly slower, but you will save time going from page to page. I set this to 50 results.
Tell Google to open search results in a new window.
Back to Wuensch's Assorted Links Page

Contact Information for the Webmaster,
Dr. Karl L. Wuensch

This page most recently revised on 25. June 2009.