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."

Comments

Since when is a "driven social content website"...

[Browzer]

a search engine?

http://www.digg.com/about

Do the wiki tiki.

[AlexanderDitto]

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.

Re:Unusual definition of "alternative"

[Odiumjunkie]

I agree, I was expecting better - in my opinion there are a host of features that people have been talking about for years that haven't appeared in any search engine I've used.

Things like:

* searching by md5 hash to find where a random file on your hard drive came from

* allowing the specifying of precise image size or dimensions to find a specific image - e.g., google indexes an image, you see the thumbnail, want to find it, but the original site is down - why can't google show me other images that match the original size and dimensions of that cached image, to help me find a mirror?

* A search engine that rec0gn!s3s 4|_|_ 5p3c!4L cH4rAters

* filtering search results by IP range

* incorporating WHOIS details in search results (e.g foo +bar -foobar inurl:baz author:"J. Random Hacker")

and so on, ideas that I hear mentioned occasionally but that never seem to go anywhere. Most of them would be fairly trivial to implement - perhaps file hashing would be too CPU intensive, but it could be limited to smaller files, or less acpu intensive algorithm could be used.

Anyways, most of these I'd only use if they were added to Google - when it comes right down to it, database size is king with search engines - I'm happy to leave the meta/interactive/social/tagging side of things to the social bookmarking sites.

Wanted: Old school search engine

[justthinkit]

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?