ConCen

Ive listed some of these before, and I remembered some others that have been posted. Just figured Id start a thread that centralizes some of the better research tools. And make sure to follow the links for more details and other good sites to use. Hopefully it'll maximize the efforts of anyone interested in doing some research of their own. Please post any that you find useful as well.

Of course there are the everyday Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and many others.
All of which collect and store your info, keystrokes and searches.
I still use them at times, they tend to have some good results. Plus, Im already in the system, I could care less if they want to look at what Im searching for.

But if I do want a search to be private and not have any record of it, I go here:
www.ixquick.com

Quote:Ixquick does NOT record your IP address!
Read more on our Privacy position or go directly to Ixquick's Privacy policy.

More comprehensive search results
Ixquick is a metasearch engine: when you search Ixquick, you are searching many popular search engines - anonymously - at the same time. Combined, these engines cover more of the Internet than any one search engine covers.

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Muckety
Exploring the paths of power and influence

http://www.muckety.com

I use this site to map relationships among certain people and organizations that may be connected.
For example:
Barack Obama: http://www.muckety.com/Barack-Obama/91.muckety
(Look at all those damn relatives!)

Quote:Muckety is published by Muckety LLC, a company founded in 2006 by a team with years of experience in journalism, technology and online publishing.

The name Muckety derives, of course, from muckety mucks. Some follow the money. We follow the muckety, producing a daily news and information site based on online databases (which we enlarge daily), extensive research and old-fashioned journalism.

We strive for accurate, timely, objective journalism. Although you may sometimes see ads with a political point of view (served automatically through ad services such as Google AdSense), we aim to be nonpartisan in our maps, news stories and databased information.

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CorpWatch
Holding Corporations Accountable

http://www.corpwatch.org

Quote:Goals, Objectives and How to Use This Site

CorpWatch.org provides news, analysis, research tools and action alerts to respond to corporate activity around the globe. We also talk with people who are directly affected by corporate-led globalization as well as with others fighting for corporate accountability, human rights, social and environmental justice.
...

How Do I Use the CorpWatch Research Guide?


Looking for information on corporations for an activist campaign, investigative article, lawsuit, socially conscious investment, or a school paper?

Our interactive guide takes you through the steps of researching a corporation on the Internet -- how to find information about a corporation's business strategy and operations, financial status, and environmental and social record.

If you are new to corporate research, develop a research plan before you start your project.

Perhaps you are looking to do deeper research. In that case, check out Industry Research or Corporations & Politics.

If you're ready to start digging for dirt go straight to our Hands-On Corporate Research Guide. Whether you are new to corporate research or a veteran muckraker, we hope this guide will be of use.

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iTools
Quick access to the best Internet tools

http://www.itools.com

This is another metasearch type site that is basically like a central hub for a bunch of different resources on the internet.
Specific seperate searches include:
Encyclopedias
Topics
Newspapers & Magazines
Biographies
Quotations
Law Encyclopedias
Law Dictionary
Trademark Search
Telephone Search
Newsgroups Search
Video Search
Maps
Language translations and a lot more.

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Project Gutenberg
The first producer of free electronic books (ebooks).

http://www.gutenberg.org

Quote:Project Gutenberg, aptly named after the inventor of the movable type printer, provides web access to over 20,000 books. It is the largest collection of free books on the internet. Works include everything from "The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci" to A History of China by Wolfram Eberhard. If you still can't seem to find a text, the site links up with other free online providers, giving you access to over 100,000 books in total. If you don't have time to make a trip to the library, Project Gutenberg can be a great way to access books without leaving the house.

There are over 28,000 free books in the Project Gutenberg Online Book Catalog.
They also have offline book catalogs to download and use at home.

A grand total of over 100,000 titles are available at Project Gutenberg Partners, Affiliates and Resources. (Some International Books)

If you don't live in the United States, please check the copyright laws of your country before downloading or redistributing a book

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Excellent post:)

heck yea! thanks silva!

very nice comeRad!!

There's a site called "archive.org" which you might find helpful too - it has links to thousands of downloadable ebooks, audiobooks, live music, public domain audio files and a great moving image collection. Well worth taking some time to trawl through it.

Here's the link:

http://www.archive.org/index.php

Happy hunting!!:)

Your welcome...

and thanks to the Doc for his addition.

Here are some others.

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DataCenter
Impact research for social justice

Main site: http://www.datacenter.org

Research tools: http://www.datacenter.org/research/res_tool.htm

Quote:DataCenter's research tools are designed to help organizers and activists think strategically about the role of information in developing actions and campaigns - and to provide a practical guide for doing effective campaign research.

The tools are organized in a sequence to take you through the research-for-action process, from formulating answerable research questions to sources and tips for finding the information you need.

Too many links to list on that site...but its definately a site you need to click around to see all that is available there. Some pretty decent resources.

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Zotero
The Next-generation Research Tool

http://www.zotero.org/

Quote:Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself.

Features:
Automatically capture citations
Remotely back up and sync your library
Store PDFs, images, and web pages
Cite from within Word and OpenOffice
Take rich-text notes in any language
Wide variety of import/export options
Free, open source, and extensible
Collaborate with group libraries
Organize with collections and tags
Access your library from anywhere
Automatically grab metadata for PDFs
Use thousands of bibliographic styles
Instantly search your PDFs and notes
Advanced search and data mining tools
Interface available in over 30 languages

Video of Zotero features:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgwMggLg71M

To download v1.0.9 Zotero: http://www.zotero.org/download/zotero-1.0.9.xpi
Minimum Requirements:
Firefox 3.0 for Windows, Mac, or Linux

This is said to be a lot like EndNote, but better from what Ive heard. I just downloaded this recently, so I havent used it that much but it looks to be a very useful tool once you get the hang of it. Mostly because it seems to help organize all of your own personal research with all of the things you've added to your library from other search tools and websites.

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keep it up and I'll pin it:)

Quote:keep it up and I'll pin it:)

I dont have much more but I'd say pin it anyway. It should be useful enough. Especially if the links are explored, there are so many places to find some valid information on a variety of topics.


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American Memory
The Library of Congress

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html

Quote:American Memory provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. It is a digital record of American history and creativity. These materials, from the collections of the Library of Congress and other institutions, chronicle historical events, people, places, and ideas that continue to shape America, serving the public as a resource for education and lifelong learning.

This site is pretty good. Ive found some hard to find speeches, News articles, as well as some other misc stuff like pamphlets and photographs from the past.

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The Hermetics Resource Site


http://www.hermetics.org/home.html

Quote:The Hermetics Resource Site was established to provide online resources to a growing community of individuals seeking answers to age old questions, as well as those who need study material to aid their inner quest.

Decent online Library of all things Esoteric.

done.

Nice post! Haha I posted that hermetics site somewhere on ConCen before:PIts a great site.

Cool thanx... hopefully this will help some fellow budding researchers that come here.

Scribd is a document-sharing website which users to post documents of various formats, and embed them into a web page using its iPaper format. Scribd currently has more than 50 million monthly users and more than 50,000 documents are uploaded daily.

http://www.scribd.com



Wikileaks is a website that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, or religious documents, while attempting to preserve the anonymity and untraceability of its contributors

http://wikileaks.org



Google Book Search is a tool from Google that searches the full text of books that Google scans, converts to text using optical character recognition, and stores in its digital database. Google Books has scanned more than 7 million books as of April 2009.

http://books.google.com



Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.

http://scholar.google.com

Have you ever bookmarked an informational, political, conspiracy, news, and/or health web page ...:)

... and then have the web page "disappear" because the web page is no longer on the sponsoring web site (e.g. the sponsoring web site displays an "error" message:(), or ...

... even worse, the sponsoring web site no longer exists ?:cry:

And furthermore, you didn't copy that web page to your hard drive ?:sad010:

And even worse, the web page in question wasn't copied by any other Internet web site on the World Wide Web ?:puter:

A possible tool to "recover" that bookmarked "lost web page" is the INTERNET ARCHIVE WAYBACK MACHINE.

The "advanced " search engine for the WAYBACK MACHINE is currently located at http://web.archive.org/collections/web/advanced.html

This search engine is part of its sponsoring web site, INTERNET ARCHIVE.

INTERNET ARCHIVE is located at http://www.archive.org/index.php

This is the site that Dr. Richard H. Thorndyke has mentioned earlier in this thread (thanks, Richard !).

As an example of how you would use the WAYBACK MACHINE ...

... let's suppose that you bookmarked, years ago, an article about the research that Austrian medical lung specialist Dr. Friedrich Bischinger conducted concerning people who "pick their nose".

Your browser bookmark is http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_90308...u=news.quirkies

But now, when you open that bookmark, the web page is there ...

... but the article is no longer there.:shocked:

If you "cut and paste" the bookmarked URL into the WAYBACK MACHINE ...

... voila!, the article is "recovered" (see recovered article at this link).

The WAYBACK MACHINE can't "recover" every web page that ever was ...

... but many times it can.

INTERNET ARCHIVE, at this link, archives many web pages for posterity ...

... for researchers, it can possibly be an invaluable tool.

Terrific thread, SiLVa !

And thanks to everyone who has contributed !!

Let's keep this thread going.

Awesome. I didnt know that included older links that cant be found.
Great addition.

(05-10-2009 05:13 PM)solar Wrote: [ -> ]The WAYBACK MACHINE can't "recover" every web page that ever was ...

... but many times it can.

It's mostly because some site owners don't want crawlers to access their content, they use robots.txt. As a result there will be no archived pages and thus no proof that the deleted pages ever existed.


Great post Silva, keep it up!

Edit:

This site might be very useful

http://scroogle.org/

An ad-free Google search proxy which prevents the searcher's data being stored by Google.