Google has a search engine. We all know it. It’s at google.com. Within Google Search, Google also has a bunch of hidden search engines and hacks, like currency converters, finding local weather forecasts, movie times, and finding stock prices.

Search engines that search specific subsets of the web are known as vertical search engines. Google also calls them “specialized search.” Google has quite a few of these specialized search engines. Many of these vertical search engines are deeply integrated into Google’s main search engine — to the point that they don’t actually look any different from a regular Google search and are only visible when you adjust your search settings. Some Google search engines, however, are separate search engines with their own URLs. Sometimes you might see a suggestion to try searching for those results in the main search engine, but when you’re searching for a specific topic, it just saves time to go straight to the source.

If you search for academic research at all (including high school papers), you should know about Google Scholar. Google Scholar is a vertical search engine dedicated to finding scholarly research.

It doesn’t always give you access to those papers (much research is hidden behind paywalls), but it does give you access to all the open access publications and a direction to start searching. Academic library databases are often difficult to search. Search for research on Google Scholar and then switch back to your library database to see if they have that specific document available.