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Internet resources for the individual countries of Europe may be found on this site's Selected Internet Resources: Europe page.
Bibliographic Databases
European
Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies (http://ebsees.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de)
"This database contains the data of two former EBSEES databases, one for 1991-2000, the other for 2001-2006. The new unified database with about 85.500 titles has been developed by the Berlin State Library in cooperation with the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, Paris. For the years 1975-1990 EBSEES is available in printed form only. Work on adding records to EBSEES ended in 2007, and no further editing will take place after December 2007. The end date for each country’s contribution varies."
Ingenta.com (http://www.ingenta.com)
Provides free searching and citations, with abstracts (often free) from scientific and academic journals, reports, and periodicals. Offers search interface for MEDLINE, UnCover, and online articles found in "Ingenta journals." Most articles are available in full text to registered users, via fee-based document delivery options.
Search engines of full-text articles
In addition to the search engines described below, many online newspapers from Eastern Europe provide searchable archives.
Find Articles (http://findarticles.com)
Provides an archive of articles, full-text searchable, dating from 1998 to the present, from more than 300 English-language magazines and journals on all topics. The texts of each article may be read or printed. Many thousands of articles pertain to the countries of Eastern Europe. Provided at no charge by a partnership between LookSmart and the Gale Group.
Search Engine and Database Directories
Complete Planet (http://www.completeplanet.com)
An attempt, partially successful, to list tens of thousands of databases and search engines by categories.
Search engine colossus (http://www.searchenginecolossus.com)
Presents an international directory of search engines, arranged alphabetically by country name and category.
SearchEngineWatch (http://searchenginewatch.com)
SearchEngineWatch provides frequently updated reports on all aspects of search engines. One report, "The Major Search Engines," describes more than a dozen major engines, all of which include coverage of East European countries. Keep in mind that no search engine completely covers the web, and larger engines do not necessarily index all sites indexed by smaller engines, or to the same depth. And each engine has a different formula for ranking the relevancy of the websites it searches. For all these reasons it is best to use more than one search engine. Looking purely at quantitative results, Google usually retrieves more webpages than other major search engines. A close competitor is AllTheWeb (or Lycos, a directory which employs AllTheWeb as its search engine). Other major engines of note are Yahoo (this is not a search engine but a directory which borrows other major search engines), Alta Vista, MSN, AOL, HotBot and iWon. Again, this says nothing about the relevancy of the retrieved websites; all of these search engines can be helpful, and searching more than one engine increases the chances of finding pertinent information.
Multimedia search engines
At the same SearchEngineWatch site listed above is a page describing "Multimedia Search Engines," which specialize in image files, sound files, or video files. Image search engines can be helpful in locating maps, photographs, paintings, etc. They display several images per screen, so that you can see and compare several choices without necessarily linking to each one individually.
Searching Tips
SearchEngineWatch
- Web Searching Tips (http://searchenginewatch.com/links/?page=facts)
SearchEngineWatch also explains basic search techniques. One helpful technique is phrase searching, accomplished in most major search engines by putting quotes around a phrase. One feature of most major engines allows the user to specify that a search term be found in the domain name (part of the URL) or in the title of the website. Some search engines, such as Google and AlltheWeb, have a dropdown menu of languages; choosing a language will limit subsequent searches to texts in that language only. Many search engines make these features easy to use in an 'Advanced Search' mode.
Search Engines of U.S. Government Websites
GPO Access (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/index.html)
The U.S. Government Printing Office makes available the most thorough set of search engines for important U.S. government serial publications and related sources of Congress and the President, such as: Budget of the U.S. Government; Congressional Bills Database; Congressional Directory; Congressional Documents; Congressional Record; Congressional Reports; Federal Register; Public Papers of the President; and Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents. Each of the serial titles listed above contains numerous references to countries in Eastern Europe. Archives vary for each title, but most of them begin in the mid or late 1990s.
SearchGov (http://www.searchgov.com)
These two websites given below index U.S. government and military websites.
USA.gov (http://www.usa.gov)
The U.S. government's official web portal.
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