Top 5 Alternative Search Engines
When it comes to online search, the general consensus is that there can only be one – Google. And for good reason – it’s great at finding stuff. So good in fact, that Google is now synonymous with the word search itself. Google it.
However, Google has only risen to the height that it’s at now by pleasing as broad a search market as possible. Which means that it is, perhaps, a jack of all trades and master of none. If you want to search for something very specific, you might be better off using something else. “An alternative to Google? Do such things exist?”, I hear you cry. Of course they do – so much so that I’ve compiled a top five. Read on.
Twitter Search
You’ll probably already be aware of this one, but it’s a good one to start out with. Twitter Search, you might have guessed, is search for Twitter.
Almost every major news event of the past eighteen months, I have heard about on Twitter first. News spreads like wild-fire on there. It might not be in-depth, it might not even be completely accurate, but lawks-a-lordy, it’s fast. So, if there’s some news that is very, very fresh and you’re looking for a little more information on it, you’d be well served by performing a Twitter search (as well as setting up keyword feeds on Hootsuite and the like).
It’s also pretty useful for tracking sentiment, as it is basically a search feed of people’s thoughts. For instance, if you fancy seeing new film and want to know what the general consensus is, Twitter Search is your man.
Backtweets
Backtweets is a more niche version of Twitter Search. It is basically exactly the same thing, only instead of search terms, it finds instances of URLs on Twitter. If, for instance, I’d written a blog post and wanted to monitor how much it had been shared on Twitter, this is the perfect tool to track exactly that. Just pop the URL in, and it’ll bring back every instance of someone featuring it in a tweet, even if they’ve used a URL shortening service like TinyURL.
Again, like standard Twitter Search, it’s pretty useful for checking sentiment. Chuck in the URL to your own site, and see what people are saying about it.
TinEye
We all know that if you’re looking for an image, Google Image Search is probably a good place to go. But what if you’ve already got an image and want to know where it has come from, or you want a version in a higher resolution, or you want to credit the original photographer? Surely such a place is only theoretical, something that could do all those things must be the result of the blackest of magicks. Traveller; friend, you are mistaken. TinEye is a ‘reverse image search’. You can either upload a photo or input the URL location and it’ll scour the web for images that match it.
Wolfram Alpha
This is perhaps a bit of a cheat, as Wolfram Alpha is technically a ‘computational knowledge engine’. But that’s what makes it different from, and in some ways better than, Google. For instance, search Google for ‘distance to Mars’ and it’ll bring back a list of sites that mention that search term, and you’ll have to hope that one of those sites features the information that you’re looking for. Wolfram Alpha, however, will simply bring back one result – the distance from Earth to Mars. Not only that, but it’ll tell you variations depending on orbit, and in a few different units of measurement, too.
It can do a lot more than that, too, as it is basically an enormous calculator combined with a search engine. So it can bring back results like this:
Pretty good.
Social Mention
Social Mention is a good engine to use for a broad view of something across the social internet. It brings back an aggregated list of mentions of your search term, across the majority of influential social channels. It’s a good way of seeing which channel discusses your particular point of interest the most, or the most positively. It also brings back a good deal of analytics data too.
Special Mentions
Board Reader: A pretty groovy search engine for message boards, with a nice trends feature.
Bing: It’s like Google, but a bit different. Splits different search verticals out quite nicely.
Quarkbase: A search engine for websites. As in, it brings back results about websites, like traffic data and where the domain is registered.
YouTube: Apparently, it’s the second biggest search engine going (in terms of search volume)..
What do you think? Are there any glaring omissions? Tell us in the comments.
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