Searching for Search Engines.

This post is by a new contributor to The 2.0 Life, Matthew Crow.

Lately, I have been looking for useful search engines besides Google. I have had to do a ton of research this year and I have a need for innovative search engines that help me find what I’m looking for faster and easier, and here are a few that I have found.

The sites below don’t necessarily have better results than you’d get from Google; what they do is show the results in a different and simpler way, or give you a unique way to search through things like images – which Google doesn’t handle very well.

Factbites

Factbites calls it self a cross between a  search engine and an encyclopedia. It’s a pretty cool search engine that takes a different approach to results than most search websites. When you search a term, factbites goes out, finds the content that is related to what you searched, then brings back the results in a meaningful sentence form.

How is this useful? It lets you truly preview the content of a website before you go and read through the site. Also, if all you needed was a small amount of info, you don’t have to leave factbites, you can just search and that info is on the page.

Google Imagizer

Google Imagizer lets you search for images through Google, but instead of small thumbnails, it displays the full image. (Update: Google Imagizer appears to have been parked. We’ll keep you posted if it comes back.)

Media Mingle

Media Mingle is another image-searching Website, but it brings up the thumbnails in a side panel, and you click the thumbnail you want and it brings the large image up in the main panel.

Clusty

Clusty is a clustering search engine.

“Wait, what is clustering!?” I’m thrilled you asked!

Clustering is a process that groups search results into folder topics, making it easy to navigate results and find what you are actually looking for. A nice feature of Clusty’s clustering is that it can tell the difference between phrases, such as “to kill” and to make a killing” allowing it to further organize results and bring you what you need. Clusty is a great tool to find organized results and related topics to what you are searching for.

Samfind

What’s cool about Samfind is that you can set categories, and within those categories choose which website you would like to search. Through Samfind you can interact with every and any website you want to, you can go directly to them, search them, and organize them all through this simple, yet resourceful homepage.

Buttonall

Buttonall calls itself  ” The Internet’s universal remote” and it’s not lying, it has 20 different search engines/websites you can choose to search from. If you want a simple website that gives you access to many other search engines and websites, check buttonall out!

ChaCha

Cha Cha is not exactly a search engine, but more of a Question and Answer resource, you can either search through their database of answered questions or ask a new questions and get it answered by a real person. Also, Cha Cha has great mobile phone features, you can text and a question and a real person will text you back the answer. This is great for those questions that you can’t find an answer to through the other search engines.

So there you have it, just a few search engines you might find useful if Google just isn’t cutting it for you.

What, other than Google, do you use for search?

Photo: andercismo

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