Engineering Village

Enginnering Village is a potpourri of contemporary Compendex, EI and other databases. It has documents that go as far back as 1884 (that's what the site claims). But the search feature is great. The site comes up with different vocabulary terms that match your query, different hierarchies under which they fall, authors, citations, and full-text (yaaaaaaaaaaa....). And if it doesn't find your document, it comes up with a close match (which is pretty close unlike the crappy IEEE Xplore search). It also has an expert search that looks like a PL editor and it has search by author, affiliation, publisher, year, d/b.