Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Introduction to the Internet: Canadian search engines

AltaVista Canada
http://ca.altavista.com/
Option to search only Canadian sites. French language interface available at: http://ca-fr.altavista.com/ The English language interface is the default for the Canadian site. There is also a French default for worldwide.

Canada.com
http://www.canada.com/
Operated by CanWest Interactive, canada.com is an Internet network and portal*. The Global Television Network and over thirty CanWest Newspaper Publications support the canada.com network.

Canadian Content
http://www.canadiancontent.net/
A portal site operated by the Canadian Content Interactive Media. Consists of a hybrid directory and web search engine with focus on Canadian content including news, weather, recipes, etc.

Canadian Information by Subject
http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/caninfo/ecaninfo.htm
From National Library of Canada. Provides links to information about Canada from Internet resources around the world. The subject arrangement is based on the Dewey Decimal Classification System.

Canoe
http://www.canoe.ca/
Covers Canadian sports, culture, news, travel, health, fashion and more. Newspaper coverage provided by Sun Media. Site owned by Netgraphe. Uses Google as its search engine.

Google Canada
http://www.google.ca
Option to search only “pages from Canada”. Google is fairly good at identifying Canadian sites regardless of domain. Has a French language interface.

Homer: The Canadian Search Directory
http://homer.ca/index.html
Focuses on Canadian news and current events and provides access to a variety of search tools. Includes a listing of Canadian search engines.

Inventory of Canadian Digital Initiatives
http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/initiatives/index-e.html
Provides descriptions of Canadian information resources created for the Web, including general digital collections, resources centered around a particular theme, and reference sources and databases.

msn.ca
http://sympatico.msn.ca
Sympatico was a portal site from Bell Canada, using Lycos as a search engine. Available in French too; the site has since partnered with MSN.

Search Engine Colossus
http://www.searchenginecolossus.com/Canada.html
Colossus offers you links to search engines and directories from 195 countries and 44 territories. Link is to Canada section.

Toronto Public Library Virtual Reference Library
http://www.virtualreferencelibrary.ca/
The Virtual Reference Library provides reliable information resources and enhances the reference capacity of public libraries through its subject guides, digital collections and online services.

Yahoo! Canada
http://ca.yahoo.com
Canadian version of Yahoo! Web search engine and directory.

French language
Branchez-Vous!

http://www.branchez-vous.com/
Bills itself as the largest French-language Internet Network in North America.

La Toile du Québec
http://www.toile.com/
In addition to some 70 guides, organized by theme, and the largest directory of Quebec Web sites (with approximately 70,000 listed), La Toile du Québec supports searches of the entire Web through its partnership with Google. Owned by Netgraphe.

*Portal: A Web site or service that offers a broad array of resources and services, such as e-mail, forums, search engines, and on-line shopping malls. The first Web portals were online services, such as AOL, that provided access to the Web, but by now most of the traditional search engines have transformed themselves into Web portals to attract and keep a larger audience.
(Webopedia)

Supplementary readings
Rocha, F., McNeur, A., Mackie, L., Creak, E. Searching for Canada : an overview of Canadian search tools.
http://www.slais.ubc.ca/COURSES/libr557/02-03-wt1/group/Canadian.pdf
Library school students’ Powerpoint presentation.

RE: Canadian Search Engines?
http://web.archive.org/web/20031012064329/http://www.aimscanada.com/ideas/adlarchive/3100.html
See postings 5 and 6 from discussion list.

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