Great Web Sites 

If you know of any great links to share, please submit them here. Also if you have any suggestions that are not links, feel free to leave a comment.

Before you just go grabbing Google, think again. Google searching leaves a trail that may let advertisers, the government, and who knows who else know where you have been. You can read about Google and privacy at Google Watch. You can also enjoy privacy enhanced Google searching with the Scroogle Scraper.

General Meta Sites cover a wide variety of subjects and are mainly for the general public, though they often contain a lot of both newsworthy and scholarly material. Many have live editors that screen out obvious "clunkers" such as term paper mills and quack physicians selling useless nostrums.

DMOZ: Also called the Open Directory Project, Dmoz, uses live editors to add sites to a variety of subject categories. DMOZ includes a Kids and Teens category and endless Regional categories to help those planning trips. The Science and Radio listings are also especially helpful.

About.com: About.com also divides and lists sites by category, often with descriptions and articles written by category editors or Guides. About.com is especially good for recreational and nonacademic topics. It does include well disguised sponsored links, so examine your results carefully.

InfoMine: The classic source for looking up academic pages on just about any subject. This site screens out term paper mills, personal home pages, blogs etc... It also screens out publisher's sites, so no tables of contents from journals are available.

Google Scholar: Google's search engine for the world of scholarly research. This search engine brings up university departments and government and academic research pages, but it also searches publishers' sites for journals' tables of contents and sometimes even suggests books. Note: the journals seen on Google Scholar are seldom full text due to copyright restrictions.

Blue Web'n.com: Blue Web'n offers thousands of outstanding sites divided by broad subject area. The audience is mainly K-12 students and their teachers. The site is also ad-free and has no sponsored links. Note: this site has some dead links.

EdSitement: A K-12 site that features arts and humanitieslinks grouped by "lesson plans." This makes this site a fertile field for browsing. The site also has a search engine. Just click the dark blue Search at the top of the page.

The Internet Public Library: A small, well maintained list of sites and pathfinders (combinations of links with descriptions and references to books and journals), on a variety of academic and academicly related subjects. The pages and links can be a bit old, but the librarian/editors are extremely selective.

Science.gov: A gateway to US Federal Government agencies' funded science and technology web pages. The site lists both government agency pages and online government publications. Needless to say, it is advertising free.