Search Engine Reviews: Dogpile and Bartleby.com

Bartleby.com is an extensive reference search engine, where you can search the full text of many great works of English literature in addition to a dictionary, a thesaurus, an encyclopedia, collections of quotations, texts on English usage, and reference books about several other subjects. It's divided into four main sections - Reference , Verse, Fiction and Nonfiction.

A valuable general reference work - the Columbia Encyclopedia - is included in the Reference category (which is further subdivided into Encyclopedia, Dictionary, Thesaurus, Quotations and English Usage).

The Columbia Encyclopedia contains over 50,000 concise, authoritative articles covering all subject fields. It's an excellent place to go, for example, if you're looking for a brief history of the Great Wall of China, or a succinct explanation of the International Monetary System or a description of the various kinds of chromatography.

Other reference works indexed by Bartleby.com are the American Heritage Dictionary, Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Simpson's Contemporary Quotations, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, and several classic works on English usage including William Strunk's The Elements of Style and The American Heritage Book of English Usage.

The Verse category includes both anthologies and individual volumes of poetry. Just a few of these works are T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, The Oxford Shakespeare which contains Shakespeare's complete works - 37 plays, 154 sonnets and miscellaneous verse, and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

The Fiction section contains works by many well-known American and English authors, for example, Agatha Christie, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bernard Shaw, Eugene O'Neill and H.G. Wells.

The texts included in the Nonfiction category range widely from political to scientific to literary, for example Albert Einstein's Relativity, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, Theodore Roosevelt's The Strenuous Life, and T.S. Eliot's The Sacred Wood.

Search Tips: Bartleby.com has an extremely clear search interface. By means of drop-down menus you can choose whether to search the whole site, each of the four major categories (Reference, Verse, Fiction and Non-fiction) and each of the individual works.

If you choose to search the entire site, you are offered additional search Options which let you control how close two or more search words must be (Proximity), the form of the matching word retrieved (Word Forms) and how important several factors are to your results (Ranking Factors).

Bartleby.com allows the use of quotation marks to enclose phrases, the asterisk to

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