Search engines:

• Google
• Yahoo!
• iSEEK (http://education.iseek.com/iseek/home.page) pulls up resources from universities, government and established non–commercial sites
• Google book search (http://books.google.com/) is an index of thousands of books, from popular titles to old, to find pages that include your search terms. Once you find the book you are looking for, you can browse through pages, find online reviews and learn where you can get a hard copy
• Google scholar (http://scholar.google.com/) search for peer–reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations.
• ERIC (http://eric.ed.gov/), or Educational Resources Information Center, is a great tool for academic research with more than 1.3 million bibliographic records of articles and online materials. ERIC provides access to an extensive body of education–related literature including journal articles, books, research syntheses, conference papers, technical reports, policy papers and more
• FREE Federal Resources for Academic Excellence
• Clusty (http://www.clusty.com/) clusters (hence its name) keyword searches to include the best results for academic discovery.
• Librarians’ Internet Index (http://www.ipl.org/) is a well–annotated directory of web resources hand–picked by librarians. It has over 20,000 records representing high–quality websites from topics ranging from technology to social science.
• Infomine (http://infomine.ucr.edu/) is a librarian–built virtual library of internet resources. The site narrows searches to a comprehensive academic virtual library filled with websites, databases, electronic journals, electronic books and directories of researchers.

Another useful database, but really only for historical research: American Memory (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/browse/) For history majors—a gateway to the Library of Congress’s database of more than nine million digitized documents, sound recordings, images, maps, and other American primary sources.