A computer
and information literate person is prepared to be a lifelong learner,
because he/she can always find the information needed for any
task or decision at hand. Such a person is comfortable using libraries
and information sources in both paper and electronic formats and
also using information and computer technology in everyday living.
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Remember
computer literacy is NOT information literacy.
For
a comparison, read this article
Who
is an Information Literate Person?
How should I
approach research as an information literate person?
Search Engines
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Major Scholarly Search Engines
In the search engine list below, Search Engine Watch provides a guide to the major
scholarly search engines of the web. Why are these considered to be "major" search engines?
Because they are either well-known or well-used.
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Google Scholar
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature.
From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts
and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other
scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across
the world of scholarly research.
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INFOMINE
INFOMINE is a virtual library of Internet resources relevant to faculty,
students, and research staff at the university level. It contains useful Internet resources such as databases,
electronic journals, electronic books, bulletin boards, mailing lists, online library card catalogs, articles,
directories of researchers, and many other types of information.
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Metacrawlers
and Metasearch Engines
Unlike search engines, metacrawlers don't
crawl the web themselves to build listings. Instead, they allow
searches to be sent to several search engines all at once. The
results are then blended together onto one page. Below are some
of the major metacrawlers.
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Dogpile
Popular metasearch site owned
by InfoSpace that sends a search to a customizable list of search
engines, directories and specialty search sites, then displays
results from each search engine individually.
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Vivisimo
Enter a search term, and Vivismo
will not only pull back matching responses from major search engines
but also automatically organize the pages into categories.
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Mamma
Founded in 1996, Mamma.com
is one of the oldest meta search engines on the web. Mamma searches
against a variety of major crawlers, directories and specialty
search sites.
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SurfWax
Searches against major engines
or provides those who open free accounts the ability to chose
from a list of hundreds. Using the "SiteSnaps" feature,
you can preview any page in the results and see where your terms
appear in the document. Allows results or documents to be saved
for future use.
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News Search Engines
If you are still looking for news using "normal" search engines, stop doing it!
You'll find the services below to be a much better way to search for the latest
news stories from hundreds of sources on the web. These services provide exceptionally
good results for current event searching, because they crawl only news sites and revisit
these sites several times per day. Thus, the results are usually focused and timely.
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Google News
Provides the ability to keyword search across thousands
of news sources found through crawling the web, while also providing the ability to browse
categories of news where headlines are assembled automatically.
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Yahoo News
Similar to Google News, you can keyword search across
thousands of news sources found by Yahoo's news crawling partner, Moreover, as well as
stories fed by major wire services and news partners. Yahoo Full Coverage lets you browse
categories of news, where articles and resources have been hand-assembled by Yahoo editors.
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AllTheweb News
This Overture-owned service lets you keyword search against content
gathered from news sites across the web. Advanced news search page allows narrowing news sources to
particular categories, such as sports or technology.
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