2.+ALT+Search+-+Our+Top+Picks

From our first search activity, we learned what Google, Yahoo!, and Bing find for us, but one must also wonder what they might miss. Are people "working" search engine algorithms so that irrelevant pages appear as top results? The Washington Post bloggers and Lifehacker, among others, are investigating. What is on those thousands of matches on which we never click? What if we are looking for specific types of content like media?

Below, we share our top alternative search engines. These are not just Google with another name (though they may use the database of one of the "big three"). We have included a wide variety: a "meta" search, a "good" search, science and technology, audio, video, music and more (image courtesy of [|The Official Google Blog] ).

Once you've seen our list, check out Folden. Folden maintains a massive site with links to a wide range of search engines. Examine the links at the site (click on the title "Search Engine Innovation"). There are links in the right column of the Folden site that identify hundreds of search engines of many varieties. You might want to check out these two additional blogs about alternative search engines: Searching Without Google and Beyond Google, Bing & Yahoo: Search Engine Alternatives.

[] "TouchGraph SEO Browser reveals the network of connectivity between websites, as reported by Google's database of related sites." By taking Google's search database of related sites and showing connections visually, TouchGraph gives us a new way to look at and see the connections between sites on the internet. media type="custom" key="9970587" width="140" height="140"
 * TouchGraph**

More on Touch Graph from the Search Engine Journal

[]
Search the web, image, video, wikipedia, blogs to name a few. Allows for:
 * Truncation
 * Proximity
 * Other advanced operators not available from other search engines
 * Includes thumbnails of pages
 * Provides excellent narrowing options on right side

Also allows you to customize your search experience by.... > //"A drop-down list of search terms will appear as you type, offering suggested queries, spelling completions and alternative spellings."//
 * Language
 * Result per page
 * Scrolling for image searches
 * One of the best perks? Suggestions on search terms....

[] RaRoi (formerly “Search the Tail”) helps you find obscure references to your searches - the ones that are less obvious and for which there may be only a handful of references.
 * RaRoi...**

This engine gives you a long list of suggested refinement tags to the standard Google search to help you get to the part of the “tail” for which you are searching.

@http://www.blinkx.com/ blinkx has built a reputation as the Remote Control for the Video Web. Now, with an index of over 26 million hours of searchable video and more than 350 media partnerships, including national broadcasters, commercial media giants, and private video libraries, it is a leader in searching online videos.
 * Blinkx**

blinkx searches videos in several ways, including speech to text that can translate from among many languages and capturing titles such as sports scores.

[]
 * Zuula**

Zuula searches and presents tabbed results from Google, Technorati, IceRocket, Twitter, BlogPulse, Surphace, and Topix. It allows you to do a search on the web, images, video, news, tags, blogs and jobs. It’s in Beta.

[] Dogpile.com is a meta search engine that “fetches” results from Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, Ask.com and many other popular search engines.
 * Dog Pile**

@http://www.wolframalpha.com/
 * Wolfram Alpha Computational Knowledge Engine**

KNOWLEDGE + COMPUTATIONAL POWER

From the makers of Mathmatica comes a search engine on and about data. Wolfram Alpha combines information from scientific, technical, chemical, medical, health, business, financial, weather, geographic, dictionary, calendar, reference, and general knowledge—Wolfram Alpha gets the answers fast.

"Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain. It provides extremely impressive and thorough answers to a wide range of questions asked in many different ways, and it computes answers, it doesn't merely look them up in a big database… In this respect it is vastly smarter than (and different from) Google.” Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks

The list of what you can do with Wolfram Alpha is quiet long. answer questions do math instantly get facts calculators do unit conversions real-time quantitative data and statistics create plots and visualizations

TOUR

Build A Widget for your site []

Never type again. Toolbars and AddOn are available for WA too. []

@http://www.goodsearch.com/ This is truly a "good" search engine. Every search you do - does some good. Every search that is done results in a contribution to a charity. A portion of the advertising revenue is sent to the charity of the day or another charity of your choice.
 * The Good Search**

[|http://www.quixey.com]
 * What About One Last Good Idea!**
 * Quixey**

Quixey- is a search engine for Apps!

@http://www.qwiki.com/
 * Qwiki**

A revolutionary multi-media approach to searches. This new search engine is in alpha -- of course that means it is in development, not even pre-release. But, what it does is revolutionary. It gathers info from around the Internet and puts it into a speech-synthesized narrative. I think you will find this quite impressive. It is not the right tool for everything (notably large data files, etc.) but, I think that it promises to become a great information engine.


 * Secret (search) Agents!**

Perhaps one of the best alternatives to manual searching is to employ a search agent - a program that will repeat periodic searches for you - every day. There are some great ones available. Here are three:


 * Google Alerts - @http://www.google.com/alerts
 * SearchBots - @http://www.searchbots.net/
 * FaveBot - @http://favebot.com/

Try out one of these and get daily updates via email or RSS!

@http://www.quintura.com/
 * Quintura**

Combining many features of other alternative search engines into a single search utility, Quintura is powered by Yahoo! It provides a cloud that one can mouse roll-over to view groups of returns. As you roll-over terms, the listing of links and summaries changes dynamically.

@http://www.rollyo.com/
 * Rollyo**

Roll-your-own search engine. This is a particularly interesting and flexible search engine that allows you to select the sites you want to search. If you have trusted Web sources in a certain area, you can simply roll your own search of those sites for information. By aggregating the search results from these sites together, you get a reliable list of returns.