As I continue exploring the digital marketplace and the 80 billion web pages of “free” information available to us today, a proper index of the online databases, references and search engines is an important starting point.
Most of us stumble across new information each and every day, without any real concept of how much information is really available to us. I wanted to provide a high-level snapshot of the free and subscription-based contents, the reference database and “table-of-contents” of our massive and universal online library.
Obviously, this list is a very partial, super-compressed listing that will continue to expand and contract in number. Each of the following categories provides a link to the listing, with individual links from the listings to thousands of specific reference databases and engines:
Academic Databases and Search Engines – hundreds of online academic databases
Encyclopedias – hundreds of online encyclopedias
Dictionaries – over thirty online dictionaries
Digital Library Projects – hundreds of online digital libraries
Magazines – hundreds of online magazine archives
Newspapers – thousands of online newspaper archives
Search Engines – hundreds of search engines
“Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.”
– Tim Berners-Lee