The major search engines like Google and Yahoo are used by most for the majority of searches however there are occasions when you want to search deeper than just keyword articles—when you want comprehensive, factual, and/or specialized information. This is where you use the different alternative search engines out there—the ones that have something a little different to offer. Let’s take a look at a few of the different alternative search engines:

Factbites.com. Have you ever been searching for the facts on a topic? This is not the copywriting or sales pitches but the facts. They use a different way of displaying search results in that the descriptions are not taken from the web page meta descriptions but are written in a format that gives descriptive information of what the site is about. In fact, they claim that in some cases you could get your research information just from the descriptions and never have to leave the results page.

Gigablast.com. One useful feature that is different about this search engine is the option on the side tool bar to limit the aging on the search results. How many times have you searched for information only to find that it was a little too old to be reliable? With the Gigablast alternative search engine you can filter searches by last day, month, week, year, or customize by a date range. What they call “freshness dating” also allows ranking of search engine results by their recent status instead of standard PageRanking.

Snap.com. This is another mega search engine with a focus on image searching. When you use the image search, you are shown the results in a previewer that browses through the set rather quickly. Snap.com has another feature that allows you to quickly preview the home pages of web sites found in your search results without having to go to that page. This is in their web enhanced mode.

Info.com. This search engine combines results from the big 5: Google, Yahoo, Live.com, Ask.com, and About.com. Even the sponsored links by paying advertisers are combined.

Clusty.com. This is another alternative search engine that combines its results from the others however this one clusters the results by additional suggested searches. It is similar to what a tool like Adwords.google.com would do with its other keyword search suggestions. The difference is that these clustered suggestions are linked to websites. The clustering categories are listed down the left-hand side of the results page.

Mahalo.com. This alternative search engine is in beta however the idea is unique. Mahalo’s focus is to rid searches from the spam of low-quality websites and provide only the most relative and informative results. Mahalo has a team of editors that take the search terms people use and gather the most relevant websites associated with them. They manually write these customized results pages. If it has not yet written a custom results page for a set of keywords, it lists results from all of the major search engines on one tabbed table.

Exalead.com. This alternative search engine also gives preview thumbnails of the web page referenced in the search results. Along the right-hand side of the results page, you have a menu of various ways to narrow your search results.

Post to Twitter

Tags: ,

Comments are closed.