Monday, January 18, 2010

Two Resources for Finding Free Online Documents

One of the things that I do to track who is reprinting my online content is to set up a weekly Google Alert for various article and page titles. That is how I came across these two resources for finding free downloadable article:

Osun.org is an online document search engine that allows you to look for PDF, Word, and PowerPoint files. This service doesn't host any of the documents, it only provides a search service. Although it looks like this site launched only last August, it is already a very high traffic site, ranked as one of the top 5,000 domains by Alexa.

The site doesn't provide any information about its ownership or history. Although its servers are hosted by Google's servers, there is no indication that it is owned or controlled by Google. A Shaw.ca article describes a test of the Osun.org search engine with Google and found that the results for the same search was similar, but beyond that they had no further insights about this site.

EbookNetworking.net is a more narrowly focused document search engine, focusing only on PDF files. It provides more information to the user, including an index of previously searched files.

1 comment:

Muazzam M said...

This is in deed pretty useful information specially for students and professional working on assignments or projects. They usually need the kind of ready-made word, power-point and Pdf documents. I made a search for digital library science project's pdf and it revealed excellent results.