From Wendy Boswell,
Your Guide to Web Search.
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Has this ever happened to you? You’re assigned an essay, or a science project, etc., and you’re given free reign to choose the topic…..yikes! What do you do? Fortunately for both of us, there are Web search tools that can help with this scenario.

Clusty: Clusty is one of my favorite search engines because of one very special feature: clustered results (hence the name “clusty”).

Clusty is a meta search engine; meaning it grabs results from a variety of different search engines and search directories. Type in any subject into the Clusty search bar and you’ll be returned not only the standard search engine results, but clustered search results as well – these are related “suggestions” that build upon your original query. Clusty is not only a great way to search for general information, but it’s also a superb way to find a topic to research.

a9.com: a9.com is in part powered by Amazon and Microsoft’s Windows Live, and has a lot of interesting features. However, the one that I use most often is the layout – a three-column newspaper template with search “groups” on the far left, Windows Live results in the middle, and corresponding Amazon book results on the right.

Why is this so useful? Because I am getting another kind of clustered results here, much like Clusty’s, except from different types of sources. Super idea generator.

Kartoo: Kartoo is a “metasearch engine with visual display interfaces.” In other words, your search results are represented visually rather than in textual list form.

Kartoo is ideal for not only generating research topics, but because of the nature of how Kartoo presents search results, you can virtually plan out an entire project outline just from the strength of one query returned alone.

For instance, I typed in “bronte” and received back a dozen different subtopics of this venerated author, including biography, books, history, etc. – all with corresponding images, a nice touch.

Infomine: Infomine is like a virtual library of information: “a virtual library of Internet resources relevant to faculty, students, and research staff at the university level. It contains useful Internet resources such as databases, electronic journals, electronic books, bulletin boards, mailing lists, online library card catalogs, articles, directories of researchers, and many other types of information.”

Just start browsing through the thousands of topics they have covered here, and there’s just no way you won’t be able to come up with a good research topic.

Ask.com: Ask has a fantastic feature that allows you to narrow or expand any topic you might want to type in.

For example, I typed in the word “web”, and under the heading “Narrow Your Results”, I received these suggestions: live Web cams, spider web, world wide web, spider web, etc.

For “Expand Your Results”, I got Internet Webshots, Webcrawler, etc., you get the picture. Basically, Ask.com is helping you to start broad and circle in for more details; this is helpful not only when you’re not sure what to research, but also obviously useful when you’re looking for more detailed information and need help finding it.

Need even more ideas for research topics? Here's a few sites you might want to try:

• Best Site of the Day: From crazy to community, social to reference, search helps to cutting-edge, you'll find it here at the About Web Search Site of the Day.
• How to Find Anything on the Web: This is where you'll find the top Web search secret tips and methods; the best place to get the skinny on how to find anything on the Web.
• Web Search 101: Want to learn how to search the Web? This is the best place to start! Learn how to search the Web faster, make your Web searches more efficient, learn about Internet search engines, and become a more precise Web searcher.