Beyond Google

When a blog post from 2013 is the first featured as "Popular content" on a UK academic website it must have something going for it. That's the case for Ten search engines for researchers that go beyond Google on the Jisc* website.

Some, like WolframAlpha, you've likely heard of before. Others are only available to the UK academic community. A new one to me, openly available and claiming access to more than 90 million documents, was BASE, described as

" one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic open access web resources from over 2,000 sources.
Key features: Allows you to search intellectually selected resources and their bibliographic data, including those from the so-called ‘deep web’, which are ignored by commercial search engines."

I tried it and found documents of interest for my genealogy research that Google missed. Try locations in your family history as well as names.

*Jisc  is the former Joint Information Systems Committee, "a United Kingdom non-departmental public body whose role is to support post-16 and higher education, and research, by providing relevant and useful advice, digital resources and network and technology services, while researching and developing new technologies and ways of working."