Dozens of search engines are categorized on NoodleTools by the criteria below. Use these criteria to find the search engine that will best suit your needs.

I need help to define my topic
I need to find quality results
I need to do research in a specific discipline
The timeliness of information that I need is
I need facts
I need opinions and perspectives
I need a specific type of media
I have special search requirements

College researchers often need more than Google and Wikipedia to get the job done. To find what you're looking for, it may be necessary to tap into the invisible web, the sites that don't get indexed by broad search engines. The following resources were designed to help you do just that, offering specialized search engines, directories, and more places to find the complex and obscure.

ABC News: Twing.com is a new search engine specifically for blogs and forums.

This 90-slide, nicely illustrated presentation discusses the background of search, browers, search engines, directories, blogs, Web 2.0, and Internet politics.

Search engines are very different from subject directories. While humans organize and catalog subject directories, search engines rely on computer programs called spiders or robots to crawl the Web and log the words on each page. With a search engine, keywords related to a topic are typed into a search "box."

The search engine scans its database and returns a file with links to websites containing the word or words specified. Because these databases are very large, search engines often return thousands of results. Without search strategies or techniques, finding what you need can be like finding a needle in a haystack.