Almost without thinking we all go straight to Google – which is great. I’ve been using it for years. But there’s a myriad of really great search tools out there. I’ve grabbed all my bookmarks for search engines on Delicious and compiled them into an A to Z of search. It’s not possible to cover every search category so I’ve concentrated mainly on search in the tech and social networking fields. Have a look through this list. It might throw up some surprises – or serious omissions – let me know!
Search aggregators (meta search)
Collecta: search blogs, Twitter, Jaiku, Identica, photos from Flickr, yFrog, TwitPic and videos from YouTube, Ustream
searchmerge: search Google and social sites at the same time
iBoogie: sorts results into categories down left side
keyboardr: search Google, Google Blogs, Google Images, Wikipedia and YouTube at the same time
Heapr: search Google, Wolfram Alpha, Twitter, Flickr and Wikipedia
Sputtr: select whichever search engine you would like to use and it redirects you to that site’s engine automatically
Panabee: search multiple engines
Sperse: search multiple engines
whonu: search multiple engines
Search alerts
ByTagg: get alerts on new search results; free software download
Alertpedia: email alerts
Search alternatives
dooblet: find alternatives to anything
Search for alternative software
Search Amazon
Amazanian: find Amazon.com products eligible for free shipping
Search anonymously
Search for answers
Search Apple AppStore
Search Bing + twitter
Search blogs
Search books
Search for books
100 Awesome search engines for bibliophiles
Search – case sensitive
http://case-sensitive-search.appspot.com/
Search colors
Google Image Search Color Filter
MultiColr Search Lab: search Flickr by colour
Search comments
Search comparison tools
Unified Search (Google, Bing, Wolfram, Wikipedia, Delicious and Stumbleupon; Firefox add-on)
Triplify (Google, Yahoo! and Live Search)
Google-Bing Search (Google and Bing)
Wolfram Alpha Google (Wolfram and Google; Firefox add-on)
Search: computational knowledge
Search conversations
Search Creative Commons
Search for definitions
Search Delicious
Search for direct download links
Search documents (online pdf, doc, presentations, and spreadsheets)
DocMazy (PDFs, DOCs, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and text files)
WhereIsNow (latest versions of documents)
Search for domain names
JustDropped (search recently released or deleted domain names)
Search eBay
eBay Desktop (download; Adobe Air app)
Search for eBooks
Search faces
Search FAQs
Search for feeds
Search for files
ShareMiner (search the web for software, video, music, ebooks, documents, games and archives)
FilesTube (searches files in various file sharing and uploading sites like RapidShare, megaupload and mediafire)
Search flickr
Multicolr Search Lab (search Flickr by colour)
Flickr Related Tag Browser (search Flickr by tags)
Flair (download; Adobe Air app)
Search fonts
Search Forums
Search for free photos
Search gadgets
Search Google + bing
Search Google + twitter
Search Google + Yahoo!
Search health resources
Search: human powered
Search for icons
Search for images
Ginipic (on web and your desktop; download to use)
Compfight (Flickr search)
Google Image Search: advanced image search now has filtering by license
ookaboo (public domain or Creative Commons images)
Search for images – by sketching
Search for images – by colour
Search image galleries
Search – International directory of search engines
Search for keyword trends
Search for keyword suggestions
Search libraries
Search Linux
TuxFinder (search for packages and documentation; search distributions)
Search local area network (LAN)
LAN Search Pro (free download)
Search for lyrics
Search for manuals
Search medical
Search microblogs
Search mp3s
Search multimedia
Searchme (search web pages, videos, images, music tracks, Twitter posts)
Search multiple social sites (simultaneously)
Search music
Search music videos
Search: news
Search: niche
Accredited Degrees: Here’s a collection of 50 niche search engines
Search for pdfs
DocMazy (PDFs, DOCs, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and text files)
Search people
Search periodically
Alertpedia (email alerts)
Search for personal information
eJustice Blog: Who knows what about you: 25 free tools to find out
Search phrases and acronyms
Search for plagiarism
Search Rapidshare
Rapidshare Search (Firefox add-on)
Search real time
Scoopler (twitter, flickr, digg, delicious, etc)
Search semantic (knowledge-based)
Search for similar images
Search for similar music
mufin (download player)
Search for similar websites
Search social networking
Identify (Firefox add-on)
Search social profiles
Search for songs
Midomi (search by humming song)
Search stock photographs
Search suggestions
Soovle (more search suggestions from your keywords)
Search for sounds
Search symbols
Search tag cloud
Adds a tag cloud to Google and Yahoo! search results
Search Cloudlet (firefox extension)
Search torrents
TorrentFetcher (download)
Search for tutorials
Search Twitter
Bing Twitter Search (only available in USA at the moment)
Search Twitter images
Search for videos
VideoSurf (searches multiple video search engines)
Search visual
Vizzl (search and browse Amazon, Ebay and YouTube)
Search for website information
Search a website
In your preferred search engine, use the following format:
site:domaintosearch.com your search terms
Search Wikipedia
Search wikis
Search for words
WordWaldo (Scrabble, crossword puzzles, etc)
Search YouTube
If I’ve missed any important categories or missed a search engine you find really useful, please let me know in the comments and I”ll add it to the list. Hope you discover something useful from this post.
Twitter
Flickr
Tumblr blog
July 16th, 2009 at 4:32 am
Awesome list! I’ve bookmarked it, I’m sure I’ll need it again and again. Thanks!
July 16th, 2009 at 6:34 am
Thanks. I’m trying to update it regularly as I come across new stuff. Starting to get a bit long now though!
July 21st, 2009 at 11:06 pm
[...] Useful links: A to Z of search [...]
July 23rd, 2009 at 9:50 am
Update on feedmil: After its first launch as a topical feed search engine in last April,feedmil.com is fully redesigned and enhanced to go real-time.
It is now a real-time search engine for a variety of live streams from blogs, microblogs, podcasts, as well as public and social media.
August 3rd, 2009 at 11:23 am
I’ll take some of your suggestions and try to apply them.
August 3rd, 2009 at 8:26 pm
There’s a lot of information here. I’ll be back again.
August 6th, 2009 at 9:51 am
You need to include LoomTV to your list of video search engines- it’s the best 1 I found cos it’s both search engine and non-stop video player: It’s right here: http://www.loom.tv
August 6th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
Added. Thanks for that.
October 16th, 2009 at 4:44 am
You can also try http://www.estimix.com – a free tool that provides a nice summary of the website performance.The estimation provided by estimix is the result of a complex analysis based on factors like: the age of the website, the demographic structure of the traffic, the countries where the website is popular and sources of the traffic.
January 16th, 2010 at 1:49 am
hao do you do
September 22nd, 2010 at 2:26 am
[...] Søgemaskiner fra A-Z Gemt under: Interessante links — Elva Björk @ 10:12 am Tags: linksamling, søgemaskiner Søgemaskiner for hvert et behov på denne liste: useful-links-a-to-z-of-search/ [...]
February 1st, 2011 at 9:00 am
Hey we have also created a search engine to find pdf files and here it is… http://wwww.pdf-file.org/
May 2nd, 2011 at 4:20 am
also you can try this site – http://findebookee.com
May 19th, 2011 at 2:49 pm
I agree that Google is a bit slow at times and using