Those of you who have been reading MakeUseOf know that Google isn’t the only search search engine on earth. We have talked about some cool search engines to remember and also how you can create your own search engine with ROLLYO. Hittery is a new app which joins this league of websites. It isn’t a new kind of search engine but in fact a custom search dashboard with some unique features which could prove to be super helpful.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article in which I described some of the features I particularly liked about Vista. However in the comments Justin and anob pointed out that a couple of the features I had mentioned were not actually Vista specific.
I decided it was time to teach myself how to really use one of Vista’s best new features… Windows Search.
Yeah, I know… wow, exciting stuff. It’s not something I used to care about either. I remember whenever I heard Microsoft banging on about the gee-whiz search capabilities of Vista I really didn’t care as I was stuck in Win32/XP style navigation; of menus and forms and tabs. Why would I be interested in changing what was already working for me?
With all the hype and user interfaces of Web 2.0, it seems ridiculous to go back to the old fashioned command line. Ask a geek and you will always find that he prefers the keyboard over the mouse simply because its “the damn fastest way” to work.
For our dear readers who are back in time from Year 2050’s multitouch interfaces and voice recognitions and don’t remember what a command line is, I would like to remind them that the command line is the allegedly boring but the all powerful geeky way to work, where you write commands and your system says, “yes master I will do it!” (of course it can say bad command or filename too!).
I am a big Google fan but one of the things that is seriously tempting me away to Yahoo is the SearchMonkey Application Platform. Online search is starting to undergo big changes and Yahoo, for once, is leading the charge. Google on the other hand is doing things in dribs and drabs by bringing out little things a bit at a time. Don’t get me wrong, what Google is giving us is good but when you stack it up against Yahoo’s SearchMonkey, it doesn’t start to compare.
Search engines have become a common necessity. With the vast amount of web sites out there, it has become much easier to find websites using search engines. Of course the most popular are Google, Yahoo, Windows Live and Ask. I have found some that are not as common and most certainly deserve to be used.
Tina has already done a huge summary of search engines that you should try out but here are another five you should take a look at.
We know that the search engine market is primarily dominated by Google, followed by Yahoo and Microsoft Live Search. Hence today, if a new search engine is launched on the same lines and if it produces search results in a similar manner like the big players, then it is highly unlikely that it will survive in this field.
Keeping this fact in mind, the new players in the search engine market are trying to be innovative and do things differently. One of them is Addict-o-matic, which lets you type a query and then instead of displaying the results from the entire web, it shows the results from certain other sites like some top social media sites, in a single page.
Tina’s recent articles on Google and search engines has made me think about how much search engines play in our daily online lives and in particular how much we rely on Google to do that searching for us. Google’s share of the search market accounts for as much as 60% , which competitors such as Yahoo and Microsoft probably pretty much consider insurmountable (leading to Microsoft’s ridiculous schemes such as Live Search Cashback, which many people have dismissed as nothing more than bribing people to use Microsoft’s search engine).
After summarizing how to use Google to yield the best search results, it’s time to have a look at what is out there besides Google. Although Google tries hard to take over the world, or at least the internet, it’s still far from being a monopolist. Yes, there are many more search engines out there, and here’s a small* collection of unusual and fun search engines you should know about.
Mooter
Mooter organizes each search in clusters of relevant categories, so that you can further dive into specific topics to find specific results. Of course you can see all the results anytime. Nice concept, but seems like the service has not been updated since 2005.
