The World Wide Web was initiated in the early 1990s as a way to organize and find information on the Internet. The organization comes through a unique web address for each web site or document, its URL (Uniform Resource Locator). The "www" in the URL indicates World Wide Web. To find information on the World Wide Web, we need to use search engines, web directories, and information portals. Google is the best-known, largest, and probably best all around search engine, but it has some good company. Search experts recommend using more than one search engine to do a thorough search, since each will index the Web differently. This page contains links to a number of search engines and portals that we encourage you to try.
Search engines create indexes of the World Wide Web by sending out bots to collect information on web pages. These are some of the best.
These search engines do not search the Web directly. Rather, they search a number of other search engines simultaneously.
These search engines specialize in finding academic materials. Please note that the Microsoft Academic Search mentioned in your text is defunct.