My Alternative Search Engine Top Picks
February 15, 2008 – 7:27 am
Since my recent departure from Google I’ve been on the hunt for alternative search engine solutions. I used Google to get started, but it felt dirty. I came across one little Gem of a website called Alt Search Engines. They produce a pretty good list of alternatives.
Well, what I found is that it’s hard to find a search engine that doesn’t use Google or Yahoo or MSN–a meta search engine as it were. But I think I’ve come up with a couple of decent solutions.
Exalead is a standard Search Engine. It crawls sites and indexes the contents just like Google does. This is good if you’re looking for something non-standard.
Mahalo on the other hand is great for the popular search terms like, “Presidential Candidates” or something like that. But they’re pretty weak elsewhere. They’ll just serve up the other Search Engine’s results in the likely event that you search for something that they haven’t written a page for.
My last pick really isn’t a pick. I decided to set up my own search engine using Sphider. It is mostly targeted at web development and it’s mostly just to make referencing web development articles easier for me. It’s currently only indexing 3 websites; 3 sites that I find pretty useful. But I think I’ll probably make my web hosting provider angry by indexing sites, and it is a slow process.
Photograph by Julio Cesar. Mahalo badge by Sean Perciva.
2 Responses to “My Alternative Search Engine Top Picks”
So what exactly spurred the move from Google? Were you unhappy with how it worked or do you just want to try and support “the little guy”?
By chris runoff on Feb 15, 2008
I’m glad you asked. Really the biggest reason is the advertising. I’ve been working on a manifesto that outlines my feelings about the topic. I’ll post it pretty soon.
By Dustin Boston on Feb 15, 2008