The Grad Seminar Page
For quick, general purpose searches comes highly recommended search.onramp.net. This meta-search engine sends your query to multiple search engines [A2Z, altavista, infoseek, inktomi, lycos, webcrawler, yahoo], collates the results, eliminates duplicates, and ranks the results for probable relevance. Their motto at this site is, "If we don't find it, it ain't there." And it is fast! If search.onramp.net seems like more than you need, here is quick access to Alta Vista, one of the best in the business:
Major search engines in addition to Alta Vista (above) are: Accufind, Excite, Lycos, InfoSeek, NlightN, OpenText Index, Inktomi, WWW Worm, PsychCrawler, and WebCrawler. These all use key words, so they are good for finding pages devoted to narrow topics. If you want to find sites devoted to broad topics such as travel or health, many directories and catalogs provide categorized lists of links. The best-known example is Yahoo.
One of the best sites was mentioned at the top of this page: search.onramp.net Some of the others below simply provide a page full of links to individual search engines.
To find usenet groups matching your interests, use Lizst. Enter a key word and Lizst searches a list of over 15,000 usenet groups to find those which include that term in their titles or descriptions. In addition, DEJANEWS searches newsgroups for articles relating to a specific topic. The output seems to be very similar to what is obtained using the Alta Vista search engine for usenet groups rather than web pages (see the form at the top of this page, which gives you the option of searching either).
Both Alta Vista and DejaNews use their own news servers to retrieve the article and display it on your computer. Therefore, even if you do not know anything about usenet groups or how to configure your computer to receive them, you can get information from usenet groups on precisely the topic that interests you.
A new, important service is SIFT at Stanford University. This facility sifts through usenet postings for any that relate to a topic which you specify. It then forwards to you only the items of interest.
______________________________________________________________________________ Since anyone can "publish" on the Web, its particularly important that one critically evaluate the online information turned up. Here is a site with suggestions on how to do this:
The Web is a lot like "Alice's Restaurant" - "you can get anything you want!" - but you'll usually have to work to extract what's useful to you from a mass of information. Just as examples I did a couple quick searches for topical areas that I knew a few of you are interested in:
Health Psychology
Neuropsychology
Just For Fun
(I collect lots of music but have a special affection for Mick & the guys.)
(Here's one of my daughter's webpages - far more professional than mine!)
(I am a passionate plant collector and perennial flower gardener.)
(Egypt is the most exotic place I've visited, but I've also enjoyed Belgium, France, Denmark,
Austria, Germany, Netherlands, Great Britian, Ireland & Northern Ireland, Spain, Italy, Greece,
the Caribbean--so many more places to see and so little time!)