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Search engines

Here are a few of the most used search engines:

 

Yahoo! is one of the best known and most popular Internet portals. Originally a subject directory of sites with well-ordered subject categories, it is now a search engine, directory and portal. Yahoo! is building a large search engine base by buying up other search engines such as Altavista, AllTheWeb and Inktomi. To go to the Yahoo! portal and main starting point, use www.yahoo.com. For direct access to the search engine, use search.yahoo.com, and for the directory, use dir.yahoo.com.

 

Google Scholar indexes publication data on selected hosts and university websites. Indexing is not restricted to free information only. Google uses a ranking system that ranks websites and Internet documents according to the number of links from other sites to the document being rated. This technique is called page ranking.

Important:

  • If you use Google Scholar, make sure that you are logged in with your ERNA account via the VPN connection! 
  • In Google Scholar, use the bibliography manager; you can find this in ‘Scholar Preferences’, next to the search box. If you use it, choose RefWorks as your bibliography manager. If you’re thinking, ‘Huh? RefWorks?’ click here.

 

 

Scirus covers free science-related web pages and content indexed in specific scientific databases. Scirus was developed by the publisher Elsevier.

The link resolver of the university library, 360Link, is linked to Scirus. You can see Erasmus' signature with articles. When you click on it, you can see whether the library has access to that article. You can active this functionality yourself: by clicking on Preferences and selecting at Library Partner Links 'Erasmus University Library'.

Web course Internet Research

For further information on searching with search engines, please see our online course Internet Research.

After you have gone through the Internet Research course, you will know 

  • the place of Internet research in your research plan,
  • the greatest pitfalls of Internet use among students,
  • the difference between Internet sources and library sources,
  • how to prepare your search,
  • the different Internet search methods that there are,
  • the best way to formulate your search terms,
  • the best way to use a search engine,
  • how to evaluate the quality and usefulness of Internet sources,
  • what to watch out for when using and searching for statistical information.