One of the many functions that blog communities like Daily Kos and Booman Tribune have evolved to serve is that of research community.
I thought a list of research resources would be a good idea. I looked for other diaries and the dkosopedia for the subject, but didn’t find anything. If this is a duplicate, let me know and I’ll delete it.
We all know about the usual search engines:
Across the jump are some resources you may not have known about…
Metasearchers combine the results from the other search engines:
Other search engines you may have never heard of:
A9: A subsidiary of Amazon.com, A9′ goal is to provide a search as personalized as your Amazon shopping experience. Main results are provided by Google, but A9 keeps track of your recent searches, lets you keep a diary of visited sites, and makes site recommendations based on past searches. The main window provides buttons to add columns such as Images, Referrence, Wikipedia, medical literature, and even other people’s searches.
SearchEngineColossus: International directory of search engines, organized by country/territory and topic.
GigaBlast: Trying to out-innovate Google, GigaBlast is constantly adding features. The site’s Giga Bits feature shows which sites have the most results for your keywords — so a site which mentions your key words 20 times will be rated high, while a site that mentions your keyword only once will be rated low. GigaBlast can also return pages related to your search but not actually containing the key words.
Teoma: Uses subject specific search technology to sort sites by relevance and popularity rather than simply counting the number of other sites linked to a site like Google does. The Refine feature which suggests ways to dig deeper into your subject. Also has collections of links from experts in a wide range of subjects.
Answers.com: Consolidates entries from encyclopedic resources like GuruNet and Wikipedia. A one-click utility you can install on your Mac gives you instant explanations. Just highlight the term or phrase and use the quick-key combination to get an instant answer.
BrainBoost: Uses a natural-language engine like Ask Jeeves, so you can ask plain-English questions. Displays complete answers with links to their sources.
FactBites: Describes itself as “more interested in content than popularity.” Heavy on encyclopedic results and features a sidebar of Related Topics.
ZabaSearch: For finding people. Queries public databases to consolidate information about people.
ZoomInfo: For finding people. Crawls the web looking for descriptions of people in press-release sites, media outlets, and public databases, then summarizes the descriptive information.
I’m sure there are many more I missed. What are the resources you use?
