Search engine directory

Ossity provides a portal to a variety of search engines. Some are general-purpose (like Google), others give access to academic papers or information for scientists or health professionals. Here you'll find information on all of the engines we use, in alphabetical order (as they are in the drop-down). Having read the description of a search engine, you can easily select it as your current choice directly from the list.

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What they say: arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for 2,083,464 scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.

Select arXiv
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What they say: For more than 20 years, Ask has been in the business of answering everyday questions, both large and small. Our mission is simple: to enable curious people to find the information they need.

The Ask brand combines a trusted search platform with fresh and relevant content meant to inspire, inform and entertain. We aim to help users discover and explore the world around them. Whether you're interested in travel inspiration, life hacks, movie recommendations or entertainment news, we have the answers you're looking for.

Select Ask.com
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What they say: BASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 240 million documents from more than 8,000 content providers. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access). BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.

Select BASE
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From Wikipedia: Bing is a web search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. The service has its origins in Microsoft's previous search engines: MSN Search, Windows Live Search and later Live Search. Bing provides a variety of search services, including web, video, image and map search products.

Select Bing
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What they say: CORE is the world's largest aggregator of open access research papers from repositories and journals. It is a not-for-profit service dedicated to the open access mission. We serve the global network of repositories and journals by increasing the discoverability and reuse of open access content. We provide solutions for content management, discovery and scalable machine access to research. Our services support a wide range of stakeholders, specifically researchers, the general public, academic institutions, developers, funders and companies from a diverse range of sectors including but not limited to innovators, AI technology companies, digital library solutions and pharma.

Select Core
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From Wikipedia: DuckDuckGo is an internet search engine that emphasizes protecting searchers' privacy and avoiding the filter bubble of personalized search results. DuckDuckGo does not show search results from content farms. It uses various APIs of other websites to show quick results to queries and for traditional links it uses the help of its partners (mainly Bing) and its own crawler.

Select DuckDuckGo
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From Wikipedia: ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) is an authoritative database of indexed and full-text education literature and resources. Sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education, it is an essential tool for education researchers of all kinds.

Select ERIC
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What they say: Europe PMC provides comprehensive access to life sciences literature from trusted sources. It's available to anyone, anywhere for free. With Europe PMC you can search and read 40.7 million publications, preprints and other documents enriched with links to supporting data, reviews, protocols, and other relevant resources.

Select Europe PMC
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You've probably heard of Google. It's the search engine most people regard as the default option (and it's Ossity's default too). In fact, Google had 91.9 percent of market share (as of January 2022) and there are over 99,000 Google searches a second! Not everyone knows, however, that Google (and its offshoot Google Scholar) also offers the option to use a variety of boolean operators that make precise searching possible. There's a useful list of these on this page.

Select Google
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From Wikipedia: Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition (OCR), and stored in its digital database. Books are provided either by publishers and authors through the Google Books Partner Program, or by Google's library partners through the Library Project. Additionally, Google has partnered with a number of magazine publishers to digitize their archives.

Select Google Books
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What they say: Google Patents includes over 120 million patent publications from 100+ patent offices around the world, as well as many more technical documents and books indexed in Google Scholar and Google Books, and documents from the Prior Art Archive.

You can see the real-time number of documents that are included from each patent office by clicking on "around the world" on patents.google.com. These totals include all patents and published applications in our index, but we cannot guarantee complete coverage. If we're missing anything, please file feedback.

Select Google Patents
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What they say: Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.

Google Scholar aims to rank documents the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each document, where it was published, who it was written by, as well as how often and how recently it has been cited in other scholarly literature.

Select Google Scholar
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What they say: Infotopia, a site created by school librarians for students and their teachers, is a directory and search engine including only websites recommended by teachers, librarians, and library and educational consortia. Infotopia is a Google custom search engine of selected sites, so you get reliable resources in your search results, while still enjoying Google`s cool search features.

Select Infotopia
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What they say: It began as a simple idea back in the summer of 1999: a single score could summarize the many entertainment reviews available for a movie or a video game. Metacritic's three founding members - all former attorneys who were happy to find a more constructive but less profitable use of their time - launched the site in January 2001 and Metacritic has evolved over the last decade to reflect their experience distilling many critics' voices into the single Metascore, a weighted average of the most respected critics writing reviews online and in print.

Metacritic's mission is to help consumers make an informed decision about how to spend their time and money on entertainment. We believe that multiple opinions are better than one, user voices can be as important as critics, and opinions must be scored to be easy to use.

Select Metacritic
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What they say: PubMed is a free resource supporting the search and retrieval of biomedical and life sciences literature with the aim of improving health - both globally and personally.

The PubMed database contains more than 34 million citations and abstracts of biomedical literature. It does not include full text journal articles; however, links to the full text are often present when available from other sources, such as the publisher's website or PubMed Central (PMC).

Select PubMed
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What they say: PubMed Central (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). In keeping with NLM's legislative mandate to collect and preserve the biomedical literature, PMC is part of the NLM collection, which also includes NLM's extensive print and licensed electronic journal holdings and supports contemporary biomedical and health care research and practice as well as future scholarship.

Available to the public online since 2000, PMC was developed and is maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at NLM.

Select PubMed Central
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What they say: refseek is a web search engine for students and researchers that aims to make academic information easily accessible to everyone. RefSeek searches more than five billion documents, including web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals, and newspapers.

RefSeek's unique approach offers students comprehensive subject coverage without the information overload of a general search engine - increasing the visibility of academic information and compelling ideas that are often lost in a muddle of sponsored links and commercial results.

Select refseek
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What they say: We started ResearchGate in 2008 to address the problems we saw in the way science is created and shared. Our mission is to connect the world of science and make research open to all. The 20 million researchers in our community come from diverse sectors in over 190 countries, and use ResearchGate to connect, collaborate, and share their work.

Select ResearchGate
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What they say: Semantic Scholar provides free, AI-driven search and discovery tools, and open resources for the global research community.

We index over 200 million academic papers sourced from publisher partnerships, data providers, and web crawls.

Select Semantic Scholar
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Wikipedia: Stack Overflow is a question and answer website for professional and enthusiast programmers. It is the flagship site of the Stack Exchange Network. It was created in 2008 by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. It features questions and answers on a wide range of topics in computer programming.

Select Stack Overflow
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What they say: Webopedia is the most comprehensive online information technology and computer science reference for IT professionals, students, and educators. We connect researchers like you with easy-to-understand definitions for thousands of technology terms and acronyms, along with educational guides and software and hardware reviews. Webopedia is updated daily to keep pace with the fast-changing tech landscape.

Select Webopedia
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What they say (from Wikipedia!): Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that anyone can edit and millions already have.

Wikipedia's purpose is to benefit readers by acting as a widely accessible and free encyclopedia that contains information on all branches of knowledge. It is supported by the Wikimedia Foundation and consists of freely editable content.

Select Wikipedia
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What they say: Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone.

Our mission is to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our work builds on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Select Wolfram Alpha
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From Wikipedia: Yahoo! Search is a Yahoo! internet search provider that uses Microsoft's Bing search engine to power results, since 2009, apart [from] four years with Google until 2019.

Originally, "Yahoo! Search" referred to a Yahoo!-provided interface that sent queries to a searchable index of pages supplemented with its directory of websites. The results were presented to the user under the Yahoo! brand. Originally, none of the actual web crawling and data housing was done by Yahoo! itself. In 2001, the searchable index was powered by Inktomi and later by Google until 2004, when Yahoo! Search became independent. On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would henceforth power Yahoo! Search.

Select Yahoo
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What they say: Yandex is a technology company that builds intelligent products and services powered by machine learning. Our goal is to help consumers and businesses better navigate the online and offline world. Since 1997, we have delivered world-class, locally relevant search and information services.

From Wikipedia: Yandex N.V. is a multinational corporation primarily for Russian and Russian-language users, providing 70 Internet-related products and services, including transportation, search and information services, e-commerce, navigation, mobile applications, and online advertising.

The firm is the largest technology company in Russia and the second largest search engine on the Internet in Russian, with a market share of over 42%. It also has the largest market share of any search engine from Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States and is the 5th largest search engine worldwide after Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Baidu.

Select Yandex
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