Google is the big daddy of all the search engines. But when it comes to topic specific searches, Google may not give you the best results. There are various other search engines designed to derive results for topic specific search. Here is a list of 10 such search engines that can act like the perfect alternative to Google.
1. Guruji.com
Launched: October 16, 2006
Known for: specifically designed for India
Launched by Anurag Dod and Gaurav Mishra, two IIT Delhi engineers, guruji.com is a search engine designed especially for the Indian user. It scores over Google because of its language advantage. Users are able to type in their own vernacular languages instead of transcribing the vernacular term in English.
The search engine also provides users the services for searching images, services within a specific city, music, cricket, movie timing, and finance. Guruji.com will work because its search is region specific.
2. isoHunt
Launched: January 2003
Known for: One Of The Best BitTorrent Index
IsoHunt is a BitTorrent index with more than 1.7 billion torrents in its database. It is one of the most famous torrent search engines. Thousands of torrents are added to and deleted from it every day. Users of isoHunt perform over 40 million unique searches per month. The site has been involved in several lawsuits regarding copyright infringement. But the site founder, Gary Fung wishes to work with the content owners.
January 16, 2007, isoHunt was taken off-line but after a major hardware upgrade, the site resumed normal operation by January 22, 2007
3. Answers.com
Launched: 1999
Known for: Gives Consolidated Responses Taken From Several Sources
Answers.com was created in 1999 by Bob Rosenschein in Jerusalem, Israel. The website was then known as GuruNet.com which later acquired the Answers.com domain name. This search engine enables knowledge exchange which includes wiki WikiAnswers, ReferenceAnswers, VideoAnswers, and five international language Q&A communities.
This search engine intelligently and automatically integrates and retrieves information from disparate sources and delivers the result in a single consolidated view to the user. The searches can be made based on several categories.
4. Wolfram Alfa
Launched: May 15, 2009
Known for: Answering Factual Queries By Computing The Answer From Structured Data
Wolfram Alfa is where you go to find answers to very specific questions. Instead of giving a list of websites as answers this site gives users the specific responses. The website was developed by Wolfram Researches. Wolfram Alpha is based on the computational platform Mathematica, written by British scientist Stephen Wolfram in 1988.
Apple’s Siri uses Wolfram Alpha for 25% of its searches.
5. Pipl.com
Launched: October 2007
Known for: The Best Search Engine To Search People
As the name sounds this search engine lets users look for people. The searches are done based on the name and location provided by the searcher. Its results are much more accurate than those of Google is because they use ‘deep web’.
The website not only produces links to all the profiles on social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, blog mentions, and photos on Flickr but also finds mentions of the searched name in public records, including property records, SEC filings, and birth databases. It also finds e-mail addresses and summarizes “quick facts” about the person.
Founded: January 2009
Known for: The Ultimate Guide For Food, Cooking And Recipes
Yummly is the quintessential search engine for food and recipes. It uses semantic search for search and ‘understands’ food on a variety of levels, allows users to search by ingredient, diet, allergy, nutrition, price, cuisine, time, taste, meal courses and sources, and ‘learns’ about users based on their likes and dislikes. Yummly uses this information to categorize food for search and make recommendations.
Yummly was founded by David Feller and Vadim Geshel in early 2009. Its headquarters are located in Palo Alto, California.
7. Scour.com
Founded: 1997
Known for: The Perfect Mix Of Search Plus Social Networking
Founded in 2007, Scour was originally named Aftervote.com, a search engine with an AJAX backbone with one mission: to deliver the most relevant results as efficiently as possible. Almost exactly 1 year later, Aftervote was acquired by Internext media, owner and operator of the ABCSearch Network and re-branded to Scour.com.
Scour’s aim is to find the perfect mix of search and social networking. Users are provided with a platform to vote and comment on relevancy.
8. Dogpile.com
Founded: November 1996
Known for: ‘Fetching Results’ From Other Search Engines
Dog pile is a metasearch engine that ‘fetches’ the best results from other search engines such as google, bing and yahoo. They also get results from video and audio hosting websites. The search engine is owned by InfoSpace Inc.
The idea behind creating dogpile.com was to save the user’s time by bringing the best results from other search engines together. The time-saving philosophy even inspired their name. In rugby, players come together and pile on top of one another. This is exactly what Dogpile does – it compiles all the best results in one easy-to-access place.
The In July 2010, Dogpile was ranked the 770th most popular website in the U.S., and 2548th most popular in the world by Alexa.
9. Goby.com
Founded: September 2009
Known for: Search Engine For Travel Specific Queries
Goby.com is a search engine for the traveler. It lets users search through 400 categories for things to do while they travel. Users are asked to input the kind of activity they want, their desired location and the desired date. Related results are shown accompanied with the maps of the area. Users can also share information using the Facebook connect option.
Goby was co-founded in July 2008 by noted database pioneer, Michael Stonebraker, Mark Watkins, Vince Russo, Andy Palmer, and Mujde Pamuk. The company received series A funding from Flybridge Capital Partners and Kepha Partners. The company is headquartered in Boston, MA.
10. Everystockphoto
Founded: April 2006
Known for: Search Engine For Photos
It is license specific search engine for photographs. It allows users to tag, rate, comment on or collect photos. The website has a collection of licensed photos accumulated from several sources which are presented in a systematic format to users.
The website is owned by Vibrant Software, located in Vancouver, Canada. The site is also connected to twitter. They also have their own blog and news feed.