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Guide
Home >> Going beyond
Google™
Going beyond Google™
Google™ is great for finding a needle in a haystack, but not always so great for finding a particular piece of hay. Here are a few reasons to go beyond a particular web search engine.
- When you want to access the “Invisible Web” – licensed
(paid-for) resources with high quality, targeted information.
Things like academic/scholarly articles, statistics, material properties, standards, patents, etc. Take a look at MIT Libraries' Vera to find listings of databases full of this type of information.
- When you need to find a very specific piece of reliable technical data. Articles and handbooks may help you with this. Try a search in Barton, the MIT Libraries' catalog for books in the area you need. For other kinds of factual data, try the MIT Libraries Virtual Reference Collection.
- When you want to find extremely up-to-the-minute news or information. Google has a lag time. There are other ways to find good to-the-minute info. Try the News category within Vera.
- When another search engine will do the job better. For instance, Google only indexes the first 110K of a file. Other search engines (like Alltheweb) get entire files. Check
out the Search Engine Watch web site for detailed analyses of web search engines.
Google Scholar™ is
another source for finding scholarly literature. This tool is
in its beta phase of development. There is no way to tell what
is included in this database, but it has been vetted and deemed
of academic quality by Google employees. You can use Google Scholar
to link to full text articles supplied by the MIT Libraries.
For more information on this, see Making Google Scholar Work for You.
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