Project #15 Search Engines

Wolfram Alpha is a major software engineering development to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. It is developed with Mathematica and Wolfram Workbench, computed with gridMathematica, and deployed with webMathematica—in fact, Mathematica technologies have uniquely made Wolfram|Alpha possible. Computational knowledge and intelligence, highly scalable grid computing, built in computable data, and smart method selection are just some of the things that make this possible.

About.com, a top 20 U.S. website, helps users discover, be inspired, and learn about topics ranging from parenting and healthcare to cooking and travel. The site is also one of the largest producers of original content on the Web.

Yahoo was founded in 1994 by Stanford Ph.D. students David Filo and Jerry Yang. It has since evolved into a major internet brand with search, content verticals, and other web services. Yahoo can be used to search almost anything. It is very helpful for people of all ages, therefore it can easily be useful in the elementary classroom.

Bing is a web search engine from Microsoft. It can be used for conversions, math computations, dictionary, and spell check, as well as other things. Another plus for Bing is that it has partnered with Apple and is their main search engine which would be helpful since many schools are using Apple products.

iSeek is a great search engine for students, teachers and administrators. Simply ask a question or enter search topics or tools and iSEEK will pull from scholastic sources to find exactly what you are looking for. The search engine is safe, intelligent and time–saving—and it draws from trusted resources from universities, government and established non–commercial sites.

Infomine is a librarian–built virtual library of internet resources relevant to faculty, students and research staff at the collegiate level. This site narrows searches to a comprehensive academic virtual library filled with websites, databases, electronic journals, electronic books and directories of researchers. Librarians from the University of California, Wake Forest University, California State University, the University of Detroit – Mercy, and other universities and colleges have contributed to building Infomine.

Populated by the U.S. Department of Education, the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) is a great tool for academic research with more than 1.3 million bibliographic records of articles and online materials. ERIC provides access to an extensive body of education–related literature including journal articles, books, research syntheses, conference papers, technical reports, policy papers and more.

Scirus is a leading search engine for science students on the web. This search engine has a comprehensive database of more than 350 million scientific–related pages including: academic journals, websites, scientists' homepages, pre–print server material, patents and institutional repository. Moreover, the site allows users to locate technical and medical data, find current reports, search through peer–reviewed articles and examine patents through a selective search engine.