5 Filters

Useful search engines

#1

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them.

:small_blue_diamond:Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

https://archive.is/ similar to the waybackmachine.

Use yandex.com or baidu.com for cross reference against Google etc

5 Likes
#2

Great list which I’ll keep for reference.

I usually use Yandex.

Not a search engine but libgen.is remains a fantastic source of texts of various kinds. Their article search also still works but Sci-Hub has been broken for quite a while now.

#3

Don’t we all love a good simple, striking example of search engine censorship.
Courtesy of Igor Chudov, who points out the significance.

Google’s Election Interference?

Take a look at google’s suggestions! I didn’t expect to get the same ones as Chudov, but I did!

image

Google is not showing much intelligence there, either :laughing:

Wondering about that recent assassination attempt on Trump?

image

Wasn’t there someone else in an assassination attempt? Ah well, must be wrong. Didn’t happen!

#4

I haven’t tried it yet, but “Perplixity” may be somewhat better. https://www.perplexity.ai/

Google is mis/dis information for anything slightly political. Want to find where to buy a wigit? Google is great.

2 Likes
#5

Perplexity is quite good, it creates short essays with footnotes and suggested follow-up questions to expand on a topic. Very unlike the archetypal search engine results, but there may be inbuilt biases I haven’t picked up yet. I explored the films of Gaspar Noe very fruitfully, for example, and other than passing references to controversy (specifically relating to Irreversible) there was no preachy b.s.

2 Likes
#6

Hi folks - I just saw this list:

Cheers

4 Likes
#7

maybe repeats but this from t on tln:

The Lifeboat News
[ Post a Response | The Lifeboat News ]

Many other websites are available … you are welcome : )

Posted by tUser icon on March 16, 2025, 5:38 pm, in reply to “Libgen is back”

It seems I had a project of collecting book websites, which was abandoned, now revived since I got pissed off with Libgen and Anna’s archive got zilched (for me anyway). Some better than others.

OceanofPDF
https://oceanofpdf.com/
This is a new one. So-so.

Memory of the world
https://library.memoryoftheworld.org/

Liber3

Reference book sources that Google hides

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. I suggest using DuckDuckGo … it works for me .

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopaedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

PS. Worthwhile checking some websites from Rask’s list in https://open-slum.org/. Some of them work for me.

Responses

cheers

3 Likes
#8

Useful to bump this and thanks for the extra material.

I noticed libgen was back a couple of days ago and if I were the type who rolls copyright law up in a cheroot then smokes it, I would very likely have updated my Kobo recently.

1 Like
#9

On a complementary note…

How to Find Anything on 𝕏: The Ultimate Guide to Search Operators

Simple operators that do what it says on the tin.

Could be worth considering in that some outlets like BBC (and now the Guardian) do not care to provide easy searches of their output. I wonder why? Strokes beard ( :face_with_raised_eyebrow: )

I must admit I like alorithms that return according to what I actually asked for (as opposed to trying to guess what it thinks I might want statistically, or what its programmers want me to see). If I mis-typed it, it can be corrected!