For most people, Google is the only search engine they know (OK maybe you have heard about Bing now!) when in fact there are a number of powerful and useful alternatives search engines out there. Blogs such as AltSearchEngines does a great job in promoting and teaching the merits of these alternative search engines. At Search 1.x, we believe that whilst a lot of these alternative search engines are complete waste of time, some of them definitely offers value to any serious searcher and you should definitely bother checking them out!
And if you are still lacking motivations and think that Google does it all for you, here are some ideas on why you should bother exploring them:
1. They Are The Specialists
As good as Google is at Web search sometimes a specialist search engine can get a particular job done better and faster. I guess its a bit like how we go to a specialist doctor for specialist treatment.
Specialist blog search engine such as Technorati has been around for a long time and has built a wonderful reputation and set of features that makes it one of the best blog search engines on the web.
One good recently launched example of a specialist search engine is WolframAlpha which claims to be a “computational knowledge engine” which ultimately means that it is a facts engine and allows users to search through a number of specialist databases of facts and figures. If you are interested in finding certain numerical facts or stats, it beats Google hands down and will help you get there faster. For example here is one WolframAlpha query that directly gives you the answer to “Date of Kennedy’s Death” on the results page. Great for trivia nights!
For more specialist search engines that what their special powers are, check out the Search 1.x Search Directory!
2. Real-time Search
This is arguably one of the Google’s biggest short comings in being able to search not last week’s websites, not even yesterday’s blog posts but the discussion and chatters happing now. In trying to answer the question of what’s going on right now, the sources of contents can be new stories, comments, conversations, pictures or videos. The subtle distinction of real-time search when compared with traditional web search being that the source of information is less important than the timely information itself.
Check out my previous blog about conversation searching using the twitter search feature!
More recently, CrowdEye and Collecta are a couple of great up and coming real-time search engines that combines real-time results from various “real-time” content sources including microblog sites such as twitter, popular blogs, and social websites such as facebook. CrowdEye is unique in that it analyses the links that are being tweeted by people and show you what are the hot or popular links. Collecta on the other hand has a bigger content sources that include not only twitter but blog posts, comments, and Flick.
3. Access To All The Results!
If you are an Information Junkie and Google fails to return any relevant results, have you ever wondered what Bing or Twitter search might bring ? Metadata search engines are specifically designed to answer this question by providing a unified results page that include search results from popular search engines in one single page.
Dogpile and Scour are two of the most popular meta search engines that gives you quick access to results from all the popular search engines.
There are however, other ways to get the same results, one such method is to use browser plugins such as the Unified Search Firefox plugin which appends search results from other search engine and sources as you do a Google Search without you having to go to dedicated metadata search engine.
3. Get To See the Future Of Search
Interested in seeing the future of search? Alternative search engines are often where the real innovation happens, so if you are a real life hacker or true technologist you ought to keep up with what’s happening it he world of alternative search engines.
Whilst there are numerous innovation in search happening as we speak, one area that is predicted to drive some real innovation in search is the area of semantic search and the poser child (or alternative search engine) in this space is Hakia
There you go, hopefully one of the above points is enough to get you to look beyond Google and go on, give it a go and let us know about your favourite alternative search engines!
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