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Mix it up: The Best Search Engines on the Net, incl. Wolfram Alpha

4 May 2009 1,050 views 5 Comments
Search Me - Visual Search Engine

Search Me - Visual Search Engine

Tired of Google? Here’s a list of some other great search engines you may never have heard of that you’ll want to give a try…

  1. Wolfram Alpha – this is hitting the news like whoa. Wolfram Alpha was pioneered by Harvard’s Dr. Wolfram and is on track to be the next step toward the symantic web. Long story short, you can search the way you’d ask a question, and get very accurate answers back, immediately.
  2. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in “10 flips for four heads” and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out. Find Out More

  3. SearchMe – this site has been around for a few months now and has been adding more content everyday. With a flash-based interface, this site focuses on providing intuitively categorized searching combined with visual exploration of content. SearchMe’s interface is clean and flexible based on how visual you want to get.
  4. LeapFish – a meta-search, all-in-one, that has greater functionality than what DogPile could have ever dreamed. The developers as LeapFish have integrated the APIs from popular sites such as Yelp.com to include search results that
  5. …captures the variety of the web in a single search interface…We have an exponentially growing multimedia Internet, and its time that search began functioning in a multimedia way,” said Ben Behrouzi, CEO of DotNext, parent company to LeapFish.  “These new authorities are part of a larger picture of building a search platform that captures more than just Web pages and traditional content.”

  6. Cuil – this has a similar category or theme-based search approach to SearchMe in that is allows the user to suggest the soul of what they are searching for.  (i.e. is food related to restaurants, groceries, reviews, recipes?) Cuil’s column-based interface is attractive and makes quick scanning of the search results very easy.
  7. The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

    Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

  8. Viewzi – view-based searching. Search results are served up in a grid format, and upon hover, you are given a thumbnail preview of the page. Oh wait, that’s just 1 of 20 different ways to view your search results! On Viewzi, the user chooses how they want to view the search results, and Viewzi handles the rest.
  9. Our View Picker helps connect you with just the right Views. We do the work of finding the best places and sources and brings those together for you. One search bar for hundreds of sources. It’s like having thousands of search engines in one search bar.

What are some other search engines you like?

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5 Comments »

  • Yates Jarvis (author) said:

    this is going to blow away Google Lab’s newest offering that I reported on last week…Google’s new feature is just too late and to sparse to compete.

  • Tony said:

    You may also like to check out SpaceTime3D at http://www.spacetime.com. SpaceTime3D allows you to search Google, Flickr Images and Wikipedia in a stunning Visual interface.

  • Myrtle Beach said:

    Wolfram isn’t operation yet – spacetime is kinds neat but has google ads all over it. Searchme looks much quicker than spacetime but the results are sometimes not what you expect.

    I still google.

  • haiseb said:

    I find it very hard to believe that some search engine overcoming the three leading search engines of today. Google,Yahoo,Msn.
    It is not a matter of technology or services, It is a package of smell,style and feel first of all.
    Meanwhile the technology will speard to other engine too. whatever it was.

  • Yates Jarvis (author) said:

    Google’s market share is substantially larger than Yahoo’s or MSN’s. Wolfram Alpha will either stick to fulfilling a different niche of search or be bought out. I don’t think any of these search engines above are betting on beating out Google- but the different methods of searching will certainly push Google forward with more momentum.

    As the devil’s advocate- no one thought that Google would have beaten out the search engine leaders of its time either.

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