100 Alternative Search Engines

Seen in Read/Write Web (by Charles S. Knight):

Ask anyone which search engine they use to find information on the Internet and they will almost certainly reply: “Google.” Look a little further, and market research shows that people actually use four main search engines for 99.99% of their searches: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com (in that order). But in my travels as a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), I have discovered that in that .01% lies a vast multitude of the most innovative and creative search engines you have never seen. So many, in fact, that I have had to limit my list of the very best ones to a mere 100.

But it’s not just the sheer number of them that makes them worthy of attention; each one of these search engines has that standard “About Us” link at the bottom of the homepage. I call it the “why we’re better than Google” page. And after reading dozens and dozens of these pages, I have come to the conclusion that, taken as a whole, they are right!

Worth investigating these. There used to be several search engines that touted themselves as academic resources (Northernlights?), or as having cleverer algorithms than the big ones (Teoma?). I wouldn’t know what to look for any more, though. Do we actually need cleverer search engines, or is raw power all that matters?

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2 Responses to 100 Alternative Search Engines

  1. Simon Mahony says:

    Thanks for this I’ll add it to my teaching pages!!!
    Simon

  2. Can your teaching pages be made available to the outside world? They sound useful…

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