Search engines are finding tools.They are designed to help you find information stored on the internet. Computer programs (robots, spiders, worms) crawl the WWW and keep an index of the keywords and phrases they find, and where they find them. There is no evaluation of sites. When you enter keywords iinto a search form the search engines scans its index to find matches. Search engines work in different ways so it is important to use two or three to get the best results.

Meta search engines search the databases of multiple sets of individual engines simultaneously.

Directories, unlike search engines, are created and maintained by people. The editors select and evaluate sites for inclusion on the basis of selection criteria. Sites are located by selecting from hierarchical lists of subject headings.

Academic Directories are created by universities and people with a proven subject knowledge in the subject discipline.

Resource Discovery Network