The search tools listed on this page will help you find freely available websites and other online information. You may also want to look at the Library's subscription databases or look for books, videos, e-books and streaming media in the Library catalog.
Search engines are the most commonly used tool to find freely available information on the Internet. Enter keywords into the search engine and a list of websites containing your terms will be returned.
The world's most popular search engine, Google indexes billions of web pages. Be sure to lean some of Google's search tips and tricks and use the Advanced search page for more powerful searches.- Duck Duck Go
"The search engine that doesn't track you." Featuring "less clutter and real privacy," DDG is a useful alternative to Google. Read Duck Duck Go's extensive privacy policy here.- Bing
Bing is a popular search engine created by Microsoft. Bing can be a useful alternative to Google. You may find results using Bing that don't appear in Google.
Encyclopedias
- Wikipedia
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Wikipedia is a collaboratively edited, multilingual, free online encyclopedia. Wikipedia conatains over 30 million articles in 286 languages, including over 4.2 million in the English. Articles are written collaboratively by volunteers around the world.Wikipedia is great for preliminary research about a topic. But be sure to use article references and your own research to evaluate the accuracy and authority of information in Wikipedia.
News
- Google News
Google News is a computer-generated news site that aggregates headlines from news sources worldwide. Also use Google News to sign up for news alerts.
Government Information
- USA.gov
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As the U.S. government's official web portal, USA.gov makes it easy for the public to find U.S. government information and services on the web.
Books & Scholarly Publications
- Google Books
Search the fulltext of millions of books. If the book is out of copyright, or the publisher has given us permission, you'll be able to see a preview of the book, and in some cases the entire text. If it's in the public domain, you're free to download a PDF copy.- Google Scholar
Google Scholar searches citations and the fulltext of scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research.
Archived Websites
- Wayback Machine
Can't find a website that's been deleted or moved? Try the Wayback Machine that lets you browse through over 240 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago.
Images
- Google Images
Google Images allows you to search for images using keywords. You can also upload images to search for similar images based on advanced matching algorithms.- Flickr
Flickr is the world's largest image hosting websites where millions of users share billions of images. Many of these images are free to use without copyright restrictions.- MorgueFile
This MorgueFile contains free high resolution digital stock photographs and reference images for either corporate or public use. The purpose of this site is to provide free image reference material for illustrators, comic book artist, designers, teachers and all creative pursuits.
Video
- YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website on which users can upload, view and share videos. YouTube include user-generated as well as commercial content. YouTube also includes a large collection of education videos.
All Multimedia
- Creative Commons Search
Search for all kinds of Creative Commons licensed multimedia including images, videos, and audio. Most of this content can be reused free of copyright restrictions.