Searching the World Wide Web

Looking for information about the library and its resources and services? Use the Search Our Pages feature at the top of each page.

Looking for information about the Health Sciences Campus? See the Health Sciences web.

Looking for information about USC? Use the USCweb search.

Looking for an e-mail address or phone number? Use the Directories page.

Yahoo! | Search Tips


Strengths: category searching (i.e., sites about the tv show Frasier); finding a top level page (the White House's home page); many sites have short descriptions.
Weaknesses: smaller number of sites than other search engines.

AltaVista | Search Tips


Strengths: through advanced mode, can search using AND, OR, NOT; can search by dates; searches not only Web pages but newsgroups.
Weaknesses: category searching is available but not recommended; does not rank results by relevance; often retrieves more results than anyone wants to look through.

Google | Search Tips


Strengths: Very fast, excellent relevance ranking
Weaknesses: Ranks pages by popularity: obscure pages may not be listed.

More Searching Tools

Search Engines:
Health Sciences Web Site Collections

Medical Search Engines:

See also the library's

General Search Tips

  • try putting your phrase in quotes ("Wilson Dental Library")
  • try using the plus or minus signs to require the absence or presence of a word (Garfield -cartoon or Garfield +president)
  • try more than one search engine.
  • capitalize Boolean operators AND, NOT, OR

You can also use a Meta Search Engine to search numerous search engines at once. This is an excellent way to find sites on obscure topics or to track down a long-lost friend's home page, but it can provide an overwhelming number of results on a common subject like Microsoft.


Mamma         Ask Jeeves         Inference Find!