8 Top Alternative Search Engines
May 6th, 2008 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean 27 CommentsTweet This
After reading Mike’s post on alternative search engine Addict-o-matic, I tried it out and liked the interface quite a bit. It’s a good way to get a blast of different kinds of search results on one scannable page. I’m adding it to my list of favorite alternative search engines to use. I’ve been adding and dropping search engines to this list for years, and in this post I’ll cover some good ways to break out of the Google lock-down and expand your search horizons.
Redzee stands out for its highly glitzy, and useful interface. Your search results come back as thumbnails of the sites the results are on. You can hover your mouse cursor over results, click and drag, and the thumbnails will cycle in a circle, similar to how you can cycle through album art on an iPod.
Most web workers are very familiar with how to search blogs exclusively, but Omgili is a great alternative search engine for searching web forums. The posts people put up there are often like blog posts, and you can get strong doses of personal experiences in the posts.
Dogpile is a good way to search across many search engines at once. I often use this to search for images, because you get a huge number of unexpected results back.
If you, like me, often search for video, try Truveo. It lets you conduct your own searches, but you can also choose categories such as Most Watched This Week. You may also find what you need at Blinkx.
Microsoft’s QnA search is a good way to get at specialized knowledge that people have. Your search inputs lead to “answers.”
ZabaSearch has become one of the most popular ways to search for people, and public information about them. I often find results here that don’t show up in other people search engines.
If you want to experiment with a whole slew of alternative search engines, try Altsearchengines.com. If you click on the “Verticals” tab there, you’ll find a huge collection of search engines focused on specific industries.
Do you know of any good alternative search engines?
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Sam,
It’s still early days and in private Beta, but check out http://www.Whozat.com, The People Search Engine. A few stories about it at http://blog.abinventio.com/category/whozat/ . Let me know what you think.
Cheers,
Alex
Yes, about 1,400 of them!
;-) Thanks for the mention.
Here’s a few of my personal favorites:
1-800-2ChaCha (any question for any reason at any time on any phone – that has text)
KartOO and http://www.kvisu.com/
KoolTorch.com and SpaceTime.com for ebay
piclens.com or the new TinEye.com
Love that RedZee!
Charles Knight, editor
AltSearchEngines.com
Check out TheSearchRace.com
More on RedZee. I’d recommend staying away:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/investigating-the-redzee-search-engine
Another people searchengine: http://www.123people.com
I’m not sure if this fits. My company has a service called Insight24 (http://Insight24.com) that was previously covered as part of the Coffee Break (http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/11/29/wwd-coffee-break-19/). It’s a directory of B2B rich media content such as webcasts/webinars, podcasts and videos.
It takes a bit of getting used to, but I get an awful lot of pleasure searching on GoodSearch. I love the fact that something mundane that I do literally hundreds of times a day raises money for the free health care clinic down the street.
If you’re looking for a different way to view results, try “http://www.webbrain.com/”. This is a Java applet that has a unique presentation of categories and results, although the search results might not be as comprehensive as Google. There’s also a personal version available from: “http://www.thebrain.com/#-47″.
I love Dogpile.com. I’ve used it for years!
Don’t forget http://pipl.com That site found things that no other website was able to find. Great site to find people.
I’m using the search on popurls.com a lot as it gets the stories even faster than google.
Some of my favorite search engines are actually the meta search engines, like Dogpile and such…
-Talking Books Librarian at http://talkingbookslibrarian.blogspot.com
one of the best meta search engine is ATUNN ( http://www.atunn.com ) in 50 languages.It’s the first Internet system !
I’ve been developing a search engine alternative for my study project. The idea is simple: instead of bots, humans have to index the web via (firefox) browser plugin.
The project is called Synopse (www.synopse.net) … let me know what you guys think of this idea.
Then there’s the newly relaunched http://find.com