Internet Research

Free Internet Resources | Internet Directories | Search Engines | Tutorials | Critically Evaluating the Internet

Free Internet Resources

Databases and other Web resources that are either free of charge or with limited content without a subscription.

Federal Reserve Bulletin - Website for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Includes news, information on monetary policy, banking information and regulation, and more.
GeoScienceWorld - Access to abstracts, tables of contents and non-GeoRef searches in a geosciences database of peer-reviewed journals indexed, linked, and inter-operable with GeoRef.
HighWire Press - from Stanford University, Libraries, peer-reviewed and other scholarly journal articles including over one million full-text articles from 256 journals.
In the First Person - Index to English language personal narratives, including letters, diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, and oral histories.
LISA - Library, Information Science and Technology Abstracts, a free database from EbscoHost.
Questia - Limited access to what claims to be the "world's largest online collection of books and journal articles in the humanities and social sciences, plus magazine and newspaper articles."

Internet Directories

Websites that are themselves collections of websites organized by subject. Websites included in these collections are often critically evaluated by information professionals.

About.com - Actual people helping you find the right website.  Organized by subject.
AcademicInfo - Websites intended to assist with academic coursework.
Internet Scout Project - A weekly compilation of new, high-quality Web resources.
Librarian's Index to the Internet - Sponsored by the California State Library.
Open Directory Project - The largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web.

Search engines

The sites listed in a search engine's index ARE NOT evaluated for accuracy, objectivity, or timeliness. Google, AltaVista, Northern Light , and FastSearch are widely considered to be the best (i.e. they have the largest index and will save you time in finding the information you need).

Tutorials for Searching the Internet

Bare Bones 101: A Basic Tutorial on Searching the Web Web - Univ. of South Carolina
Finding It on the Internet - From Univ. of California-Berkeley

Critically Evaluating the Internet and WWW

ICYouSee: Guide to Critical Thinking About What You See on the Web.