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The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines
ReadWriteWeb writes "Search Engine Optimizer (SEO) Charles S. Knight has compiled a list of the top 100 alternative search engines. The list includes Artificial Intelligence systems, Clustering engines, Recommendation Search engines, Metasearch, and many more hidden gems of search. People use four main search engines for 99.99% of their searches: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com (in that order). But Knight has discovered, via his work as an SEO, that in the other .01% lies a vast multitude of the most innovative and creative search engines around."
As with most lists, I've got some nitpicking to do.
... yet.
All the large companies I've worked for don't care about world wide web search engines. Those engines used by the populace with the revenue coming from ads or 'paid search' or some indirect service business model. Now, a lot of companies are interested in Enterprise Search Engines and would pay a lot of money directly to a search engine company to come in and set up the technology to do intranet searches.
The engine we currently use at my fortune 500 company sucks. I mean it is the worst. I would rather have a blindfold on with stumps for hands trying to type in an estimation of the internal IP address than use our search engine. That said, I have been told that we investigated using "Google Technology" although my superiors soon found that it wasn't at all better than what we already had. And so I've heard of a few others that have doubted Google's ability to dominate in a closed domain. They are clearly the winners in an open domain internet search but I haven't seen anyone take advantage of it as well internally
So while the external market may be broken down 99.99 to 0.01, the internal enterprise search side isn't that lopsided.
Two engines that I've used and found to be novel ideas are BrightPlanet's Deep Query Manager and Collexis (NIH demo). DQM is able to extract data from databases that are available through search on the local page but are not indexed by Google. DQM has you create jobs since they take so long to run. Collexis can process raw text and fingerprint it, then compare that fingerprint to documents that have been fingerprinted quickly. Two ideas that Google, MSN & Yahoo! don't really cover. I find it odd that a site like Yoople (what appears to be a slow German Google) made it on this list but not DQM.
My work here is dung.
I was expecting to see specialized search engines, rather than generalized ones that happen to use unusual algorithms. Things like Baidu Mp3 search or Astalavista; the ones that allow special-purpose searches that feeding them into google would just produce crap.
Remember, there were no nuclear weapons before women were allowed to vote.
.. I want "accurate"
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
zombo.com
when i go there, i simply forget what i was looking for. problem solved. because you can do anything at zombo.com
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
a search engine?
http://www.digg.com/about
Does slashdot or Sourceforge have a decent search engine to look for source code, sample code for particular APIs ?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Ha, that's OK. I just use Google to find pages on Wikipedia. It's got all the information I'LL ever need from the internet.
In all seriousness. There must be a reason why Google's floated to the top of the search engine love list, and I highly doubt it can be their (nonexistant) effective advertising campaign or their (also nonexistant) entertaining flashed-based website, because we all know people love those. No, I have to say that Google's got to have come up on top because they've been giving fairly accurate results. I know that if my search results were completely off, there would be almost nothing keeping me from switching to a new search; and, ironically, a search on Google for search engine brings up quite a few possibilities.
I see no problem here... I'll just move right along.
No, Mr. Green. Communism is just a red herring.
Just gotta ask: what happened to Excite and Altavista? Both of these guys still look up...
www.btjunkie.org
What do you think?
Music map is interesting, but I needed to enable scripts in FireFox, I don't see reason why it uses scripts and all this animation instead simple results list.
http://www.music-map.com/
Something like Digg, or Stumble Upon, is how many web users surf. It's the latest in Channel Hopping, and I think it's here to stay.
The latest craze on the web is a 2000 Bloggers meme, where the photos of the blogmasters link to their website, giving people a random way to surf the blogosphere based on the looks of the author.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
About the only thing missing on that page is a Web 2.0 AJAX-powered we-not-me community-focussed useless-when-compared-to-google search engine for searching that top 100 list.
I want a search engine like Google was before they bought into blogging and brought that bias into their search results. Search engines that bias results in favor of pages that are heavily linked to end up supporting the status quo over newer-but-better ideas/products/pages, the corporate bullies vs Hertz. This could be a great small business incubator. Does such an engine exist today?
I come here for the love
See, Slashdot gives you that little box labeled "Subject". It's for you to put the subject in there. Not half of your comment.
are typosquatters?
Find everything there is to know about "salshdot!"
Enterprise search is always difficult, companies like Fast Search and Transfer specialize in it. They have all sorts of document filtering pipelines and customized database connectors to hook all sorts of data into their search system. It also scales quite will across a cluster.
On the specific topic of this supposed top 100 list, I notice it is mostly a list of what is 'neat' as most high ranking non-top 4 search engines are not listed. Neilsen and most other traffic rating groups would definitely not agree with this list. Not a big deal, though the title is definitely misleading.
They are entirely right, many of the most revolutionary search engines out there are not mainstream. Did you know that the big four comprise less than half of the top 10 most innovative search engines?
"Search engine Spammer". There's no such thing as SEO.
"in the other .01% lies a vast multitude of the most innovative and creative search engines around" -- all looking to get bought by one of the top four.
Are you...Are you some kind of genius?
No, ma'am, I'm just a regular Slashdot reader.
The article was written by an SEO. Who says he doesn't rank them by how easy they are for him to manipulate?
"But Knight has discovered, via his work as an SEO, that in the other .01% lies a vast multitude of the most innovative and creative search engines around."
I guess the problem I have with this statement is just how exactly 'innovative' and 'creative' are quantified?
Specifics from the article:
KartOO and Quintura are listed as being particularly innovative and creative. How so? Graphically, maybe, but the 'maps' that these search engines provide seem like a graphical gimmick at best, and downright annoying at worst.
Metasearch engines, while useful, don't strike me as being either particularly innovative or creative; they work well when searching for something particularly obscure, but for a 'day to day' type search, I've often found that even with very specific search criteria I often have to sort through a bunch of useless search results before finding something useful; using a metasearch engine gives me a longer list of worthless resources before finding what I need.
While there is something to be said for creativity and innovation, I've found that for my purposes, a simple interface like google works the best. I'll concede that I may be a fanboy without realizing it, however.
Yikes. If you have a graph with N nodes, it's N-dimensional. There are more than three websites. The difficulty is embedding the graph in two or three dimensional space. There are lots of algorithms for doing this, choosing the distance between nodes, and so on. Each necessarily discards some information, but choosing the right one could help. And maybe such a look at the web would be interesting, but it doesn't seem like it's always the most useful. You're probably interested in the big clusters, the centers of which are found by Google's PageRank and displayed in order. Google can hide the leaves of each cluster, true, but they may be (a) less important or (b) easy to get to from the center.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
Liveplasma links Transsiberian Orchestra with Iron Maiden. Yeah, I see so much in common there.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
"...lies a vast multitude of the most innovative and creative search engines..."
They're innovative and creative, but nearly useless as well.
The engine we currently use at my fortune 500 company sucks. I mean it is the worst. I would rather have a blindfold on with stumps for hands trying to type in an estimation of the internal IP address than use our search engine. That said, I have been told that we investigated using "Google Technology" although my superiors soon found that it wasn't at all better than what we already had. And so I've heard of a few others that have doubted Google's ability to dominate in a closed domain. They are clearly the winners in an open domain internet search but I haven't seen anyone take advantage of it as well internally
Closed domains have this thing called "Access Rights" - typically governed by either Novell Directory Services, or Microsoft Active Directory.
By and large, most enterprises don't want the janitor to be able to get on a kiosk terminal and surf the local search engine until he arrives at the document entitled FISCAL_YEAR_BRIBES_PAID_TO_MEMBERS_OF_THE_LOCAL_Z
So a "closed domain" document spider is gonna have to be granted Administrator/Supervisory rights to the authentication infrastructure [which is a HUGE security risk in and of itself], and then it's gonna have to keep track of the pertinent access control lists before deciding whether or not individual users have the right to view search results.
And if, as is typical, you've got four or five different authentication infrastructures in an enterprise [Novell Directory Services, Microsoft Active Directory, Sun iPlanet Directory Services, Oracle Internet Directory Services, etc etc etc], and if they aren't all tied together in some kinduva coherent LDAP framework, then that's just a massively complex project to even think about attempting to undertake.
On the term "alternative search engine" and post the first 100 results as an article?
Not so long ago, you'd see such a list as everyone using Yahoo!, Altavista, Hotbot and Google was mentionned with the 1% also-rans.
Time changes things, but not all that much. Some go up, some go down. I'd be willing to place a bet that some of their top-4 will dissappear in the next ten to twenty years while one of the also-rans will become a household name. *shrug*
Vivisimo not among the top 100? This is silly. Vivisimo is the first I turn to when Google fails to deliver. And they cover Googles shortcomings very well.
In my book (and that of many others) Vivisimo is SE #2. And for good reasons too.
www.vivisimo.com
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
A9 uses MSN or Google, SimplyGoogle uses Google, Soople uses Google, etc, etc, etc. They just provide a new or innovate method of presenting the results, the result order is still the same.
Also, Digg is listed? Del.icio.us? AOL???
I'd rather have a top-10 list of REAL alternative search engines, not "portals" and such written by a SEO of a search engine optimization company.
I decided to try searching for myself in some of these search engines, and though i might show up eventually on the page, I don't see them as being more accurate than Google... I mean, what about Ninja.com... that actually did turn out to be more accurate than Google... but some of these are linking me to the French musician by a similar name......
Relocating to San Francisco / Palo Alto... Hire me?
I don't see http://scirus.com/ - scientific information search engine.
Vijay Kiran
I blog, therefore I am.
Since when are sites like digg, del.icio.us and last.fm considered to be search engines?! Some of the other listed sites are also nowhere near what would spring to my mind when someone says 'search engine' - just see for yourself.
This article / blog is a farce.
"Nae Kin! Nae Quin! Nae laird! Nae master! We willna be fooled again!"
Part of this guy's research involved Googling "alternative search engines."
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
This seems odd, but I was looking up some css, and javascript information. I couldn't find it on google, but I figured I'd search through digg. It worked. I've done this a couple times.
Like the old yahoo and about.com, sometimes user selected content is better. Its different though because you depend on the description given to the article by the person submitting it.
Don't trust the makers of blinkx
My web domain.
Does anyone know whether that "99.99%" figure is accurate, or was it pulled out of the author's nether regions? Because it sure doesn't smell right.
I typed Dreadful Snakes into the music search engine No results, Funny I have 2 of their Bluegrass albums
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
I entered "John Cale" and Fleetwood Mac is closer tha Velvet Underground and Brian Eno.
I was hoping it was a music blog search site.
Yeah cus the first thing I think when I'm reading an article is what colour the authors' hair is. Seriously though, how would you find good content just by what people look like? I guess these kinds of people watch RocketBoom or whatever it's called to get their tech news.
I'm going over here and I don't know why!
Many of those are NOT search engines at all (at most sites with a search feature) and many fairly well known, useful and actual search engines are ignored - where is technorati? where is boardtracker? blogpulse? sphere?
At least the 'author' could have done 5 mins research to find something actually relating to the title..
Here China has over 130 million Internet users, and Baidu shares over half of the web search market. But the article claims the four big shares 99.99%, so we are not count as "people" according to it!?
Ehy Yoople! is in the list! Great news...unfortunately it's linked to a wrong address...and that's not great!eheheh Yoople! is http://www.yoople.net/
Usage stats for some of those can't be too good.
Or maybe I'm wrong. But it seems like the big 2 or 3 would command 99.99% of all search traffic,
leaving very little for these guys.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
I don't see that any of these "alternative" search engines offer fixes to Google's current shortcomings (or at least the ones I run into). Personally, I can't wait til there's the Wayback Machine's archives are searchable by text rather than just domain. Hell, I'd even be appreciative if you could search for parts of domains. I can't overstate how often I'm driven crazy by remembering something from a site I saw long ago and not being able to refresh my memory because the site either went down or fell out of Google's listings.
It searches a catalog of links. What more do you want? When google fails me, del.icio.us is the 2nd place I try. I think of a tag, and look at the most popular links of the tag. This actually sometimes gives me better results than a google search. If I am seraching via delicious, I'm not the only one.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
It's about random discovery (not content quality). Not quite like the Google I'm Feeling Lucky button, but close. And you know the blog isn't spam as it's been human added.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
and why is it flirting with me
Continuing an age-old tradition I guess: "Why is a dog asking me questions?" - Award for the Silliest User Interface: Windows Search
ChaCha is not AI.
It's impossible to simulate stupidity and ineptitude on that level. And if it is, I'm shooting myself!
they're now owned by the big guys. using them is pretty much pointless ever since google came out with a better algorithm. the big four (google/yahoo/msn/ask) use comparable quality algorithms, everyone else just leeches off them or uses much lower quality algorithms
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
Our site Bessed is a human-powered engine built on WordPress to allow for commenting on search results & adding new sites. Just launched in October so nowhere near comprehensive, but I think we pass the innovative test.
>> I find it odd that a site like Yoople (what appears to be a slow German Google) made it on this list but not DQM Uhm Yoople! is not a slow german google...Yoople! is Collaborative Web Search! Unfortunately the address is wrong! The real Yoople! is at http://www.yoople.net/
There is no such a thing as "accurate", for obvious reasons. Information retrieval is based on finding relevant documents based on a user request. What is "relevant" to you might not be for me, etc.
"Your snide attitude is a bit odd - does it make you feel good?"
:)
Slashdotters have a chip on their shoulders. Something about being taken off the breast too soon.
Any way here's my search engine
Here's one thing to keep in mind. The hidden web. Search engines have improved, but a lot of content is still inaccessable.
Metacrawler.com was the original metasearch, and it's still my number one choice. I can't believe it didn't make the list. You can even (through a configurable cookie) choose which search engines you do and do not want to use, so if you dislike Google, for example, you don't have to use it.
Hi - I am Charles Knight, the creator and keeper of this list of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines. I have *already* updated the list based up good feedback, which I shall continue to do all year long. If you would like a copy of the very latest version, just send me an email at: Charles@CharlesKnightSEO.com. The list you receive will have the revised Top 100, Search Engines not yet reviewed, Search Engines not yet released in Stealth Mode, Mobile Search Engines and the list of Search Engines that did not make the Top 100 list. Thank you for all of your helpful suggestions!
* A search engine that rec0gn!s3s 4|_|_ 5p3c!4L cH4rAters
You do realize that t3h h4x0rz came up with 13375p34k in the first place just to avoid searches for "73h 600|) 57|_|ph" by the unwashed and undeserving masses.
Any 14m3r can get ahold of LimeWire these days to search the joke that is Gnutella. The slightly more-dedicated will search for torrents on websites and via IRC. It's the real 1337 m4$t0rz amongst us who will Google-hack for open folders on servers and simply get our 1337 w4r3z shipped "express." (Mmm, mmm, leeching.)
Screw the great equalizer that is the Intereweb, you should get what you deserve. Open MP3 folders galore to explore the highs and lows of house mixes for the h4x0rz, and teasing pr0n0 trailer WMVs for everyone else. Plus the resultant spyware for the exclusively Norton-bound 1us3rz. =P
98% of America's teens drink alcohol, smoke, and have sex. Put this in your sig if you like bagels.