Five Offbeat but Useful Online Search Engines
Most of us web workers spend a good deal of time each day searching the web, and it’s no secret that Google tends to be the tool of choice. Still, alternative search engines are often good for targeted kinds of search tasks, and it’s even true that they sometimes just accidentally deliver what you’re looking for faster than Google will. Not long ago, I rounded up eight of my favorite examples. In this post, I’ll cover several additional offbeat search engines that may provide exactly what you’re looking for.
Northern Light Search is the best free resource I know of for business-related searches. It scours thousands of business news sites, blogs, regional newspapers and other sources. If you frequently, say, write about a particular company or topic you can save search terms to quickly run them on a regular basis.
Never count out low-tech solutions when it comes to searches. You may already be familiar with ChaCha which connects you with paid search assistants who can sometimes pop up with an answer faster than you can. 1-800-KNOW-NOW is a similar kind of service you can access on a phone. The company employs “know it alls”—experts in areas such as law, politics, medicine and more who are paid small fees to take your call and provide answers.
Tyloon specializes in yellow page and local searches, and is one of a growing crop of multilingual search engines. If you look at the upper right of Tyloon’s homepage, you’ll find toggles that allow you to search in English, Spanish, or traditional or simplified Chinese languages.
Finally, KoolTorch is one of several alternative search engines that will organize your search results onto graphical clusters, with labels such as Business, Regional, and more. Within a cluster, you can drill down into more sub-categories until your search results start to get more and more narrow. It’s good to try if you’re getting a sea of search results back on a particular topic, but not exactly what you want.
Do you use any good alternative search engines?
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Check out lumifi (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QihZbeuLtEk) a research engine with unique data management and collaboration features built in.
I have a search engine that beats all the others! Your local reference librarian. I am a reference librarian who answers questions all day long. If I can’t find it, either you did not tell me the full story (happens more often than you might think) or it is not available for free. We know our stuff better than you may expect. I think the area where we may slip would be in the realm of the “invisible web” sorts of items.
Of course, we do use search engines – Google is a big favorite. You can look for online chat reference as well in some states in the United States, as well as email reference.
Most libraries will have a web page where you can obtain access to other search tools – magazine databases, newspaper indexes, directory assistance, Dun and Bradstreet, Mitchell and Alldata car repair information, etc.
OK I will get off my soapbox now, and back to work.