Eleven Alternative Engines for Custom Searches
October 12th, 2007 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean 16 Comments
Google has become so dominant among search engines that many web workers use it at the exclusion of all other engines. The web is actually loaded with unusual types of search engines, and if you get a feel for what some of the offbeat ones do, you can often save a lot of time getting to the search results you really want. In this post, I’ll round up eleven offbeat search sites that I use on a frequent basis.
Kartoo. Kartoo is a very interesting way to have your search results come back as a large graphic. Hover your mouse over components in the graphic, and you’ll see Flash-based visual representations of sub-topics relevant to your search pop up. You also see images that accompany individual search results which can help you drill down to exactly what you want.
Clusty. Clusty is based on technology that was originally developed by Carnegie Mellon scientists who wanted to tackle the problem of information overload in web search results. When you do a web search at the site, you don’t just get back links, but also a pane of topics related to your search that looks like a textbook’s outline. It can frequently take you to a desired search result without you having to linearly read through a long list.
Omgili. Omgili is sort of similar to the many blog search engines available, except that it focuses its searches on web forums. It’s a good way to find discussions on various topics. For example, the first search return if you search for “best laptop” is a college discussion forum on favored laptops.
Grokker. Grokker is best known for delivering an exhaustive list of meta-topics related to any search term you type in. In can save you time if you’re sifting through a sea of results.
Freeality. Freeality is a quick way to do searches in many search engines from one page, without having to jump around to different sites. You can do everything from Google to MSN to AltaVista to Usenet searches from it. It also lets you easily search for companies, games, music, phone numbers, and more.
Ask City. Ask City is a good way to search for businesses, events, movies and more and then easily customize and annotate local maps of locations.
ChaCha. ChaCha pays human guides to assist you as you search, and many of the guides have expertise in various categories such as searches for health-related information. The guides vary in terms of being helpful, but the model is an interesting one.
MagPortal. MagPortal focuses on searching for online articles in many magazines and journals. If you know that the search result you want is a magazine article, try this site.
Dogpile. Dogpile is similar to Freeality in that it searches through many popular search engines from one spot, but the difference is that it actually searches multiple engines concurrently, not one by one.
Business.com. Business.com is a search engine exclusively dedicated to finding business information.
Truveo. Trueveo is a very nicely organized site for searching for timely videos across many categories. A set of tabs up top let you search for news videos, entertainment videos, and in other categories. Each tabbed topic also lets you drill down for most viewed videos in the category, highest rated category videos, and more.
Do you have any web search tips?
16 Comments Post your own comment
Charles Knight says: October 13th, 2007 5:43am
Those are excellent choices!
You can see dozens -hundreds- more every day at http://www.AltSearchEngines.com - that’s all we do!
Charles Knight, editor
AltSearchEngines.com
Boris says: October 13th, 2007 8:17am
It’s always great to see some attention given to search engines other than the “usual suspects.” Clusty, for example, has been doing a great job providing clustered metasearch results for a long time. When I talk with professional researchers, it’s often mentioned as a trusted resource.
One neglected video search resource you may want to include in future lists is , which has a lot more to offer than most of the other video search sites that people typically use.
Also, I can’t help but suggesting that you add to your list. It makes it really easy to get — and compare — results from all the major search engines, for a variety of different search types.
Alternative Search Engines « Vannevar Vision says: October 13th, 2007 4:00pm
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lo-fi librarian» Blog Archive » This Week’s Useful Tools says: October 14th, 2007 5:37am
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ARRiiVE says: October 15th, 2007 5:30am
Helpful information - especially on Kartoo. I hadn’t found them yet, so I appreciate the post! I linked to you through my blog at
Phil Bradley's weblog: Eleven Alternative Engines for Custom Searches � Web Worker Daily says: October 16th, 2007 8:01am
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Eleven Alternative Engines for Custom Searches from WebWorkerDaily « Hartness Library System says: October 16th, 2007 9:54am
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Who Will Own the Search Experience? « GigaOM says: October 18th, 2007 5:17pm
[...] PM PT | No comments There’s big action in search engines these days: see Web Worker Daily’s list of 11 alternative search engines, Read/Write Web’s top 100, and the GigaOM show’s opening question to Google’s (GOOG) Marissa [...]
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Dave Liu dot com / musings from the edge » Articles of the Day says: October 29th, 2007 4:24am
[...] Big Three Fatigue? Try One of These Alternative Engines - Yes, Google rules the search world (and just released ridiculous earnings), and yes, Yahoo and MSN just launched major upgrades to their crawlers. Let’s not forget about Ask.com, the search engine that seemingly gets no credit for the whole “Universal Search” craze … But searchers are constantly exploring the Web, and while the big three (or four?) engines snag the majority of traffic, there are an infinite number of choices users have for search — and getting listed with these “alternative engines” can give one site a previously unknown advantage over competitors. [...]
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Cindy says: January 13th, 2008 12:55pm
There is a new search engine coming on line based on the String Logic search tool. Considering the effeteness of String Logic it will be the most powerful engine to-date. Google seems to be deteriorating daily and I’m (strange as it may seem) using Yahoo more and more. There are only 3 real engines out there that have the proper operators that allow direct searching, AltaVista, Yahoo and a distant 3rd google. Google was in first place for years but has dropped off considerably in the last 2 years. The funny thing is they are the top 3 by no understanding of their own.
Web Worker Daily » Archive Google Experiments with New Search Tools, and You Can Too « says: January 29th, 2008 4:00pm
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