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The Wizard's Favorite Search Sites
The best search engines on the web*

Google has indexed over 2 billion web pages and has innovated a wide range of creative methods for searching those 2 billion pages. It has become the gold standard for search engines. Google Labs is an interesting source of experimental uses of the Google database. Click Here to Go to Google Labs. Below are listed some tips (by no means exhaustive) for making use of the wealth of information on Google:

Google Tip #1: You can restrict your search to academic websites by adding "site:edu" (do not include the quotation marks and leave a space after "edu") before entering the specific word or phrase you want to search for. Give it a try.
Google Tip #2: Check on links to a specific website by typing "link:" then the URL for that website. The format is [link:URL] without the square brackets.
Google Tip #3: If you only want to search website titles, try the following format [intitle:text], where you would type intitle, colon, followed by the text you want in the title.
Google Tip #4: Similar to tip #3, you can search URLs for specific text. The format is as follows [inurl:text].
Google Tip #5: If you would like to restrict your search to Adobe PDF documents, you can do so specifying the "filetype" you want in the results, using the following format [filetype:pdf]. If you want power point files, use "ppt" instead of "pdf" or if you want Word documents, then use "doc" after filetype.
Google Tip #6: Most people have discovered that Google allows for searching current "news" on specific topics. Here's the link: Google News
Google Tip #7: Want directions from Podunk to East Bumluck? Try Google Maps.
Google Tip #8: You can search mail order catalogs on Google (not online catalogs, but the old fashioned paper kind). Click Here for Google Catalogs.

Use the the link below for search of Britannica.com database

Click Your Heels Three Times

* Web rankings are based on a series of test submissions and the degree to which the sites are ranking their listings based on non-commercial criteria (versus sites that rank based upon paid placements). Five College (Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, Hampshire College, Amherst College, and the University of Massachusetts) students are invited to participate in the ongoing evaluation process by contacting Satya Gabriel in the Department of Economics, Mount Holyoke College. Users of Wizard's Favorite Search Sites are invited to send their own evaluation, comments, and questions to sgabriel@mtholyoke.edu.
This page was created and is maintained by the Wizard of Oz.
Last modified January 2, 2003.