For example, suppose you want to find information on the effects of vitamin E on aging. Using Researchville you could search the Internet for material on this subject from several different viewpoints.
You might start with a web search which would retrieve information from a wide variety of sources. Researchville accesses AllTheWeb, Alta Vista, Excite, Google, HotBot, Lycos, Northern Light and Thunderstone - an excellent selection of search engines.
For this search, you might enter
+longevity +"vitamin E"
and then repeat it in web directories, which include Yahoo, Open Directory, Suite101.com About.com and others.
To find specialized medical and nutritional information you could search the engines included in the Health and Medicine category - British Medical Journal, DrKoop.com, Intelihealth, MayoClinic.com, OnHealth, and WebMD. These engines would return information ranging from scientific articles to consumer health information.
Since the government does so much health-related research you might access the engines in the Government category. These include Alta Vista Government, FedStats, FirstGov.com, Google UncleSam, GovBot, SearchGov.com, SearchMil.com and usgovsearch. Here you would find studies done by the Dept of Aging, FDA, National Institutes of Health, etc.
And to get the most current information on this topic, you might search engines in the six categories having to do with news - Today's News, Newswires, General News, Newspapers, Business News and Tech News.
Because you would be doing all these searches from Researchville, you would save a considerable amount of time and effort.
Search Tips
To search Researchville, choose a category (e.g., Directories, Government, Images, etc.) enter a query, click on OK, and then choose one of the search engines or click on open all links in New Windows (which searches all the engines in that category).
Researchville seems to transmit search requests as they are written to all the engines it searches, and if an engine doesn't happen to use a particular operator it will usually ignore it. Therefore, you can try any search operator.
You're given a choice of searching one engine or all engines in a category. Unfortunately, it's not possible to do a metasearch of only a few engines. This can waste time - especially when the Internet is busy.
