Selected Specialized Search Engines •Art •Business •Education •Humanities •Law & Government •Literature •Medicine •Music •Recreation •Reference •Religion •Sciences •Social Sciences

There are a growing number of search engines and directories that focus on Internet resources in specific subject categories. Surprisingly enough, these subject-oriented Internet databases are relatively easy to locate. Try some of the following techniques:

• Use the following resources. Most are searchable and subject-organized directories of content-oriented search engines, portals, and directories:
  • Beaucoup (http://www.beaucoup.com) -- Browse Beaucoup by category to find specialized search engines. The Beaucoup search engine is actually a Meta Search Engine, and not a search engine exclusively for Beaucoup.
  • FinderSeeker(http://www.finderseeker.com) -- FinderSeeker is a search engine that will focus on finding specialized search engines. Select the category of interest, a country of interest, and enter search terms.
  • Internet Search Engines (http://www.searchengineguide.com/searchengines.html) -- Scroll down through the advertisements to get to the search engine and directory. The search engine focuses on specialized search engines.

• OAISter (http://www.oaister.org) -- Very valuable resource for finding scholarly material (journal articles, manuscript collections, dissertations, etc.) that are available in the open access environment.

• Use Yahoo (http://www.yahoo. com).
  • Select a particular subject category; perform a search on the phrase "search engine" and limit that search to the selected category.
  • Click on the link, "Web Directories" when it is a subcategory option on appropriate Yahoo subcategory web pages.

• Use Virtual libraries such as the Subject Collection (http://www.ipl.org/div/subject/) at the Internet Public Library (http://www.ipl.org/), InfoMine (http://infomine.ucr.edu/), the Librarian's Internet Index (http://lii.org/), or the World Wide Web Virtual Library (http://www.vlib.org/) because they often lead to major guides to content areas that include search engines.
• Use the following search strategies in major search engines, like Alta Vista, Google, HotBot, Go.com, Lycos, etc.
  • Perform a search that requires search results containing both the subject content AND search engines, for example, in Alta Vista, you could do the following search to find medical search engines: +medici* +"search engine*"
  • If possible, experiment with further narrowing the search so that some or all of the words used as search terms are in the title of the document. Using the above example in Alta Vista, alternative searches might be narrowed to:

  +title:medici* +title:"search engine*" or
  +title:medici* +"search engine*" or
  +medici* +title:"search engine*"

• Although not a specialized search engine, the Search Engine Showdown (http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/) web site is very useful for identifying popular and/or new major search engines and for providing information on the search features (http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/features/) of those search engines.
  
  
• Another useful search engine to find web pages that are no longer available is the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/). Use the known URL of a website that is no longer available, place it in the "WayBack Machine" search engine and if the resource has been archived, you will find it in various iterations. For example, to see the various incarnations of the Al Gore 2000 Presidential Candidate web site, use the following URL: http://www.algore2000.com/ in the "WayBack Machine" search engine.

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Art
Artcyclopedia --http://artcyclopedia.com/
World Wide Arts Resource -- http://wwar.com/
PhotoLinks -- http://www.photolinks.net/

Business
Bloomberg Online -- http://www.bloomberg.com/welcome.html
SEC EDGAR Database -- http://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/webusers.htm
Advice for Investors (Canadian Public Companies) -- http://www.adviceforinvestors.com//index.phtml

Education
Education World -- http://www.education-world.com
LessonPlanz -- http://www.LessonPlanz.com/
SearchEdu.Com -- http://www.searchedu.com

Humanities
Hippias (Philosophy) --http://www.iep.utm.edu/
Free Translation -- http://www.freetranslation.com/
The Internet Movie Database -- http://www.imdb.com/

Law and Government
All Law -- http://www.AllLaw.com/default.asp
CopSeek Directory and Police Search Engine -- http://www.leolinks.com
FLITE Federal Legal Information Through Electronics -- http://supcourt.ntis.gov/
MuniSource -- http://www.munisource.org/
United States Government -- http://www.firstgov.gov

Literature
The Internet Classics Archive -- http://classics.mit.edu/
The Plays of William Shakespeare -- http://www.theplays.org/index_main.html
Project Gutenberg Search Engine -- http://promo.net/pg/
OpenSource Shakespeare -- http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/

Medicine
Hardin Meta Directory -- http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/hardin/md/
HealthAtoZ -- http://www.healthatoz.com/
HealthWeb -- http://www.healthweb.org/
MedExplorer -- http://www.medexplorer.com/
RxList -- http://www.rxlist.com/

Music
Lyrics Search Engine -- http://www.lyricsrobot.com/
MIDI Search Engine -- http://www.musicrobot.com/
MusicSearch.com -- http://musicsearch.com/
Wav Search Engine -- http://www.musicrobot.com/cgi-bin/windex.pl

Recreation
CitySearch: New York City -- http://www.metrobeat.com/
The Quilt Channel -- http://www.quiltchannel.com/
SkiCentral Search -- http://skicentral.com/

Reference
AddALL Book Search and Price Comparison -- http://www.addall.com/
World Flag Database -- http://www.flags.net/

Religion
All Things Spiritual Database -- http://www.allspiritual.com/
ARTFL Project: Multilingual Bibles -- http://estragon.uchicago.edu/Bibles/
Bible Gateway -- http://bible.gospelcom.net
Jewish Community -- http://jewish.com/

Sciences
BioChemNet -- http://www.biochemlinks.com/
Discovery Channel -- http://www.discovery.com/search/search.html
Scirus - for Scientific Information -- http://www.scirus.com/
SciSeek -- http://www.sciseek.com

Social Sciences
FeMiNa -- http://femina.cybergrrl.com
NativeSearch.com (Native Americans) -- http://nativesearch.com/
Political Information Search Engine -- http://www.politicalinformation.com/
Social Work Search -- http://www.socialworksearch.com/
WWWomen.com -- http://www.wwwomen.com/