Whenever I need to do some research, find an image or perform any kind of web browsing, Google is my search engine of choice. I’ve gotten pretty good at finding what I need and modifying search terms to produce more exact results. This is probably why Google captures over 60% of U.S. online searches.
However, it’s important to remember that Google is not the only search engine out there. You also have the other two big players – Yahoo! and MSN – and a handful of up-and-comers looking to offer their own unique approaches to online search engines.
Here are a few to check out.
• Kosmix
This engine is in the “beta-ish” stage and incorporates more real-time search results. Information is sorted by source – ie. If it came from Twitter, Hulu, YouTube, blogs or government – and has about 12 different search categories, or featured searches.
• Twine
This is more of a community search engine where you create an account and receive tailored search results. You customize your interest feeds and are provided with results based on your Web use.
• Searchme
Call themselves the first multimedia search engine. It’s interface is similar to that of iTunes and allows for easier sorting and shuffling through videos, images and music.
• Hakia
Hakia’s search results come from sites that are recommended by librarians – which I guess would make this helpful for school reports. There is a link on the homepage that says “Compare to Google” where you are given the Hakia challenge and you get to see side-by-side search results for the two search engines.
• Wolfram Alpha
This is a computational knowledge engine, so it’s more of a calculator than a search. Even if an answer to your question doesn’t exist online, Alpha will use algorithms to gather data and produce the answer for you.
• Cuil
This start-up has already deemed themselves as the world’s biggest search engine – stating they search three times more pages than Google and 10 times more than Microsoft.
• Scoopler
This is another real-time search engine. It takes updates and feeds from a variety of social networks – like Twitter and FriendFeed – and sorts through them to display results.
