Which 1,400 search engines do you use?
Posted by buddyscalera on July 30, 2008
Okay, sharpen your keyboards, and get ready to search. Which of the 1,400 top search engines do you use?
What? You only use Google? Pfeh! You mainstream, conformist, follower. (Use Yahoo? Don’t gloat, it’s not exactly “indy.”)
By industry estimates, there’s over 1,400 search engines floating around these days. Really. Here’s the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines.
And that doesn’t even include http://www.cuil.com, which recently launched. (It’s pronounced “cool.” Yes, really.)
Some of the others have equally creative names like ChaCha.com, Twerq.com, Twingly.com, Famhoo.com, and Mahalo.com.
So why so many search engines? Well, most engines have highly specialized search parameters. That’s a fancy way of saying that they narrow searches to a specialized audience.
Again, so why so many search engines? Well, if you’re Summarize.com, it’s for profit. Twitter.com bought the Twitter-only search engine Summarize.com for a cool $15M.
Search is big business and it’s getting bigger. Hey, I have a great idea. How about a personal search engine for everyone in the world? I’ll make billions!
What? Oh yeah, they already have that at Rollyo.com.
That’s clever web-speak for “Roll Your Own.” Oh…how cuil.
Words-Pictures-Web 
Charles Knight said
Thanks for the mention!
I hope your readers will stop by AltSearchEngines.com anytime to see the latest search engines.
Charles Knight, editor
AltSearchEngines.com
Bryan E.Warner said
I gotta say Buddy…myself living out here in central Oregon all my life ( like being raised in a Cave ) the only ones I was aware of was Google-Yahoo-is Safari and Firefox engines too..you must for give me..I stick with what I know.I guess I should be more out-going 😀
Thanks man.
Blessings!
Bryan
Amy Jeynes said
Ironically, I would need a search engine to determine which of these search engines might be the best fit for my needs. AltSearchEngines.com looks interesting, but I don’t feel as if I have time to shop for search engines.
Still, in the interest of improving myself, I’ll give AltSearchEngines.com 3 minutes to show me something I might like. Ready, set… go:
Aaand… done. Observations:
* AltSearchEngines.com seems designed for industry buzz-watchers, not for users like me. I’d need some other way of finding useful search engines.
Anyway, I found the Top 100 list and picked a couple of engines to try. I pretended I couldn’t remember the name of a particular Charlie Chaplin movie that I wanted to find. I searched for the words “Charlie Chaplin movie corn feeding machine”.
* Searchme.com looked cool at first, but I found the big page images of little use because I couldn’t read the text.
* SearchCloud.net was–forgive me–godawful. Clever visual idea, but having to clunk around with increasing and decreasing font sizes in order to weight my search terms just felt unnecessary. I couldn’t see any clear benefit in my results from the weighting. And the list of results that was unceremoniously dumped onto my screen reminded me of the days of typing “DIR C:\ /P” at the DOS command prompt.
It would take a recommendation from a trusted friend to get me excited about any other search engine. Until the word-of-mouth reaches me, I just won’t have time to go searching for new places to search.
sandrar said
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