This article covers 5 free scholarly search engines for students. Although there are many search engines available online which anyone can use to search the web, those search engines are designed for general use and give mixed results. If you have to find educational resources, you can get good results with those search engines. But to achieve that you might have to go through multiple pages manually checking each result whether it’s relevant or not.
That’s why there are separate search engines that help you easily locate the educational resources of the web. Here, I covered 5 such search engines to find scholar resources. Students can use these search engines for their scholar research and easily find educational resources from established providers. So, let’s dive in the article and discuss these free scholarly search engines in details.
Also read: Free Website to Share Educational Activities for Teachers, Students
5 Free Scholarly Search Engines for Students:
Wolfram Alpha
Wolfram Alpha is an online educational answer and computational engine. This platform offers detailed educational content on almost every scholar topic whether its Mathematics, Science, Technology, Society, Culture, Everyday Life, Food, Finance, or anything. You can either select a topic from the categories or do a search and start reading on that exact topic and learn from basic to expert level.
The content on Wolfram is exact and curated for academic use; it’s not like a regular Google Search Card or Wikipedia. For example, if you search algebra, instead of showing videos or explaining the various definition of algebra, it takes you directly to algebra under its Mathematics section, provides you a simple and easy-to-understand definition and lists all the sub-topic under it with examples. It gives you problems for practice as well.
Apart from the educational content, Wolfram Alpha is a computational engine as well. It means, it has various types of calculators and computational tools powered by modern technology (ML and AI). Unlike any other regular calculator, these tools provide you step by step solution by explaining each step. And, to overcome the occasional boredom, it has a Surprise Me feature that picks a random topic for you to read.
Wolfram Alpha also has monthly subscription plans for individuals, students, and teachers to take full advantage of this online education platform.
Try this scholarly search engine here.
iSEEK
iSEEK is another free search engine with the goal of empowering individuals with knowledge. This platform has a huge knowledge database covering all segments of scholar knowledge and beyond. It gathered thousands of resources from government, universities, and other established providers. By default, it searches your query to its internal knowledge database (Education search option) and provides results along with related documents. It also has a Web option that gives you relevant results from the web.
When you search for something with the Education search option, it lists the scholar topics, subjects, sources, places, and other relevant resources along with the results. All this Education and Web content combined make it one of the best search engine for scholars to find quality educational knowledge easily.
Give this scholarly search engine a try here.
Virtual LRC
VirtualLRC is another free search engine for scholar knowledge. It stands for Virtual Learning Resources Center. The functionality and content on this website totally satisfy the name. At the homepage, it has the following categories:
- Arts & Recreation
- Biography
- Health
- History
- Language
- Literature
- Math
- Science
- Technology
- Social Science
- Opinion
- News and more
You can select any of these categories and browse the content in that area. This website packs a detailed well-structured knowledge on each of these topics which redirects you to other established providers. Being listed as a search engine, it also has a custom Google search tool to quickly search a topic instead of going through categories.
Infotopia is another search engine to easily locate scholar content on the web. It is similar and related to VirtualLRC and covers more art and recreation categories along with a trending section.
You can try this scholarly search engine here.
Google Scholar
Google also has a search engine to easily find scholar content on the web. This scholar search engine goes by the name Google Scholar. It looks like a simplified version of the regular Google Search engine that only lists the educational articles and resources in the results. It doesn’t include any videos, cards, or anything like that in the results.
Alongside each result, its mentioned that if there is any document available in the source. And if there is any document then the format (PDF, DOC, etc.) of that document is also mentioned. Furthermore, it has filters to curate the search results by time and relevance along with options to include/exclude patents and citations. And, if you logged in with your Google account, you can add an article to your library. Google also has a search engine to find books online called Google Books.
Search web for educational content with Google Scholar here.
RefSeek
Last, but not least, RefSeek is another free search engine to find educational resources online. This search engine provides you two methods to find the scholar resources; Directory and Search.
The Directory gives you the following list of directories to browse the resources by categories:
- Almanacs
- Atlases
- Answers
- Bookmarking
- Calculators
- Coding
- Dictionaries
- Directories
- Educational Videos
- Encyclopedias
- Health & Medical
- Literature
- Mathematics
- News Sites
- Publishing
- Quotations
- Search Engines
- Software
- Teacher Resources
- Translation
- Visual Arts
- Writing
Each of these categories lists further established resources where you can find relevant content.
If you’re in a hurry and don’t have time to go through the categories, you can use the search option. The results in the search are similar to regular Google search but without any unnecessary content. The search tool also has a document section that filters out the resources with the document(s) in them.
Give RefSeek a try here.
Closing Words:
These are the 5 free scholarly search engines for students. Depending on what you are looking for, you can use any of these search engines and easily find the scholar resources on that. If you are looking for a scholarly topic from syllabus then Wolfram Alpha is one of the best options to go with. And, if you are looking for additional resources on a topic then you can try the rest.
