by Wendy Boswell

Next to email, search is Internet users' primary activity. But most people don't realize that there's a LOT more search engines out there than just the Big Four: Google, Yahoo, AOL, or MSN. In fact, there are literally hundreds of really great niche, or vertical, search engines that focus on all kinds of topics: images, jobs, Bit Torrents, blogs, etc. You can find all sorts of great stuff using these alternative search engines that you might not be able to find on the more general, Big Box-type of search engines; plus, most of these niche search engines have really interesting features that are fun to play with.


Here are just a few of the great alternative search engines out there on the Web.


Clusty is a metasearch engine, meaning it combines results from a variety of different sources. However, Clusty adds a bit of extra search engine goodness in the mix by giving you clustered results. Basically, clustered results are extra search suggestions arranged by category

for example, if you type in "coffee", Clusty responds with clustered results to the left such as Tea, Espresso, History of Coffee, etc.

Indeed.com is a job search engine. It is not a list of message boards, or a place where you can actually submit your resume. Indeed is extremely simple to use, and covers all the major job boards, newspaper classified sites, niche industry sites and corporate job sites. I found more jobs in five minutes on here than I did searching on other job boards. You have to go to the individual websites in order to apply (which is kind of a pain) but this is a great way to generate job leads. Indeed also offers a nice toolset for the job searcher, including a JobRoll, "a customized, dynamically-updating list of jobs that may be placed on your blog or website."


Isohunt is a Bit Torrent search engine. Isohunt does not host files; Isohunt only helps you find files, and therefore is a completely legal service. From an Isohunt forum thread: "IsoHunt crawls several torrent sites, and when you search for torrents here, you get links to HTML pages on these sites where the. Torrent files can be found." Finding Bit Torrent files on Isohunt is made even easier by viewing the Isohunt Zeitgeist..


With a brand new site design, FoodieView is one of my all-time favorite alternative search engines. FoodieView is a recipe search engine searching over 175,000 recipes from all different kinds of sources, including AllRecipes.com, The Food Network, Martha Stewart Recipes, and many more. FoodieView is a targeted recipe search engine with a lot of really interesting features; it's also extremely easy to find good recipes on FoodieView that are actually relevant to what your search query is, which, if you've ever tried to find a recipe using certain ingredients on one of the bigger search engines, you'll agree with me when I say that it can be a huge time-waster.


Ditto.com is a free image search engine that enables users to search for images, quickly and easily. Ditto recently announced that they have 500 million pictures in their image search (and counting), and they claim to have the "largest searchable index of visual content on the Internet via proprietary processes." Basically, Ditto is a way to find images fast and effectively - they've also been around for a pretty long time in Internet years (I remember using them back when they started in 1999). A good alternative to Google Images.


Healthline.com is a medical information search engine, with lots of interesting features that make it very simple to use (in other words, you don't have to have an MD degree to find what you're looking for here). Healthline is solely dedicated to finding medical information online, and it offers medically filtered results developed by trained medical personnel.




FirstGov.gov is an absolutely mammoth search engine/portal that gives the searcher direct access to searchable information from the United States government, state governments, and local governments. It can be overwhelming, simply because there is SO much information here. I would suggest that you get your feet wet with FirstGov by using the Information By Topic directory, or you can choose to drill down by viewing the Site Index. In addition, FirstGov offers an above average Advanced Search help page.


AuctionMapper is an extremely cool search engine that focuses only on eBay listings. Sure, eBay has it's own site search; but AuctionMapper takes that site search and goes a few steps further. There's all sorts of geeky fun to be had with AuctionMapper; the whole site is full of maps, animated thingies that fly around, Star Trekky sounds

it's just a really well-done search engine that is not only fun to play with, but it's actually useful, a combination that seems to be hard to come by these days.


Daypop is a current events/blogosphere search engine. Daypop crawls sites that are updated frequently in order to bring searchers the latest news; included in Daypop's index are newspapers, blogs, online magazines-any site that is updated on a regular basis will make it into Daypop's index. You can use Daypop to search a small slice of the Web for news and information, see what people are talking about in real-time, view what links are being passed around most frequently, and more. I use Daypop as my own virtual office water-cooler; it's a great way to catch Web trends before they become trendy.


Blinkx TV is basically a search engine that allows you to search for audio, video, and podcasts using not only keywords and phrases, but also content in the actual clips that you're looking for. For example, if you wanted to find Kermit the Frog's "It's Not Easy Being Green", you could type in "having to spend each day the color of the leaves", and Blinkx would be able to fetch your data using not only your content, but the concept behind your content - the spoken word (or in this case, the lyrics). It's also another search engine that's just beautifully designed

you're going to want to make sure you have relatively high-speed access in order to view the site the way it was intended.

This is just the tip of the iceberg as far as Internet search engines; over at About Web Search I've been profiling a new search engine every day this fall - 100 Search Engines in 100 Days - and I haven't run out of material yet. The Web is just so massively ginormous that one search engine could not ever possibly hope to index all that information in one place. Alternative search engines are an excellent way to get different snapshots of the Web than what you may be used to.


Wendy Boswell edits About.com's Web Search section.