8 Top Alternative Search Engines

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?

loading

Comments have been disabled for this post