Google is widely (and rightly) recognised as the mother of all search engines. But, if you need to drill down your searches by more specific details, do you trust Google to give you what you need every single time?
Here’s a collection of 3o vertical search engines which you should have up your sleeve when you need some specialist power.
Blogs
People
9. Pipl.com – Search for people all over the world from a simple interface.
10. 123people.com – Aggregates public information from a number of sources to give a spread of person-specific information.
Forums
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11. BoardReader.com – The best free discussion board and forum search tool out there.
Music
12. MixTurtle.com – Basic music search engine by artist and / or song title.
13. SongBoxx.com – Search over 7,000,000 tracks from the one location.
14. Music-Map.com – Type in your favourite artist and then a map of similar artists will be returned (very cool).
15. AudioGalaxy.com – Search for and save your playlists in the cloud from this very slick site.
Audio and Video
16. PodScope.com – The web’s leading podcast search directory.
17. Blinkx.com – Search over 35 million hours of video.
Resources
18. SlideFinder.net -Instead of starting a new presentation slide from scratch, see if the one you need is here.
19. FileDigg.com – Search for files by type e.g. .ppt and .pdf etc.
Domain names
20. Panabee.com – A great way to search for website domain names and generate names if you are struggling for ideas. [Also, read this before naming your startup.]
21. NameNinja.com – Another brainstorming tool to discover domain names.
Icons
22. Iconfinder.com – Great for finding different file versions e.g. .png and .ico.
23. Iconseeker.com – A standard icon search engine.
24. IconArchive.com – One of the most comprehensive icon search engines on the web, includes really useful sub-category search.
Private search
25. DuckDuckGo.com – This engine allows you to search for sites without bring tracked at the other end.
Similar websites
26. SimilarSites.com – Search for sites similar to the ones you love in a simple way.
All-rounders
27. Blekko.com – Uses ‘slashtagging’ to narrow down your results.
28. KeoTag.com – Tag search multiple search engines for the latest content.
29. Scour.com – A social search community.
30. Greplin.com – Another social search engine with desktop capability.
While some of these are better alternatives to Google and the other major engines, for the most part, the big boys do it incredibly (incredibly, incredibly) well.
olly via shutterstock
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