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December 2007 InfoTip: All the OTHER Search Engines
Yes, we all Google, although I have recently started Yahooing more than I Google. But there are far more search engines out there than Google, Yahoo, Live.com and Ask.com. It is almost impossible to keep track of all these other search tools; fortunately, other people have taken that job on. Note that the sources I have described below are not meta-search engines such as
Dogpile.com; that is, they do not execute a search across a number of search engines. Rather, these are tools to identify the search engine that may best meet your research needs.
One site I was introduced to by Amelia Kassel is
AltSearchEngines.com. It is not a
directory of search engines as much as a collection of "Top 100 Search Engines",
arranged in a glorified blog format. The easiest way to find a search engine
that might work for your topic is to click on the most current monthly list of
the top 100 search engines (Click here for the list for November). Although AltSearchEngines.com has a "search" page, ostensibly to search its site, it does work well. A better way to mine AltSearchEngines is to use Google's
site:
search. For example, to find specialized search engines that focus on science, go to Google, and search for
science site:altsearchengines.com
If you want to limit your search to reviews in 2007, you can search
science
site:altsearchengines.com/2007
You can also go directly to the archives, where you can browse by topic - Top 100, Alts, Verticals, and so on.
Another approach to providing easy access to alternative search engines and specialized databases of content is
GoshMe, a service now available in beta (requires registration, but you can see one version at
beta3.goshme.com). GoshMe combines the broad coverage of something like AltSearchEngines and the ability to see the results of your query in a number of databases and search engines.
Here's how GoshMe works. You type your query into the GoshMe search box -
"global warming", for example. In the GoshMe search results page, you'll see three links to what are calculate to be the most relevant web pages, then there is a category labeled 'Go deeper... Best Databases on "global warming"'. Next are the first 10 databases or specialized search engines that have content on global warming. Click the "preview" link next to any of those search results, and a preview box will open, letting you to see the search results page from the query "global warming" in that search tool. Among the first few search engines returned from this query were the US Global Change Research Program, LiveScience.com archive, and an archive of The Guardian newspaper.
Neither of these tools is perfect, but both offer a way for you to try other ways to dig deeper into the web.
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