Best Search Engine Alternatives

Sure Google has 93% of the search market share, but does that mean it's the best place to search for everything? The short answer is: no.

While Google may be the starting point in your quest for conventional (broader) information, it's not always the best place to quickly find what you're looking for.

Here are some examples of websites and apps that serve as alternative starting points to searching on Google.

Note: Google Image and Bing Image are listed as alternative search destinations to conventional search engines even though they are, in fact, actual search engines. But alternative image search is its own animal and the results are (primarily) featured in a separate section of each of these engines, which is why they're listed among the alternatives.

As illustrated above, there are many specialized websites (or apps) that focus on one topic such as travel, music, and shopping. These sites are sometimes referred to as "vertical search engines," and their popularity is evidence that the way we search is changing. Many of the sites serve multiple purposes.

For example, LinkedIn is a robust job search engine, but it's also a professional social network where companies recruit new talents, users can join groups to exchange information, and people can share and consume content on self-promotion, marketing, advertising, and professional development.

The need (and expectation) to find specialized content quickly drives people to seek search engine alternatives and is causing fragmentation of conventional search — a breaking away (for certain things) from the ever-ubiquitous Google.

Consider the following pie chart:

This chart is a great visualization of how vertical sites like YouTube (video), Amazon (shopping) and Pinterest (images) are fragmenting the search engine pie. Even though Google and Google Images are massive in comparison, all the sites listed above have a huge user base, so there are sites better than Google.

This post is about the best search engine alternatives - with a twist. We're going to list some of the best vertical search resources (sites and apps) broken down by category. Chances are you're familiar with some of these resources, but hopefully, we'll introduce you to some new gems that you can add to your arsenal of resources.

Let's get conventional search engines out of the way. Sure, there's Google, Bing, and Yahoo, but here are some alternatives if you want to shake it up a little.

A screenshot of Google's original home page from 1998 (how cool is that?)

There are two kinds of Google alternatives when it comes to product search - retail stores bucketed under one (or a few) brands such as OldNavy.com which includes several brands under the Old Navy umbrella (Gap, Banana Republic, Athleta, etc.) and meta-shopping sites such as Google Shopping. We're leaving out Google Shopping and Amazon since they're so ubiquitous and offer up some alternatives that you might not know about.

We'll end this post with a few meta search engines that focus on different verticals. Metasearch engines aggregate results from multiple sources. These sites can be broad, pulling results from conventional search engines like Google and Bing and listing the results in one place. They can also be more specific, vertical search engines that focus on one category such as Nextag. Here are a few you can test out for yourself.

The sites we've listed are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to alternative search engines. There are tons of great search engine alternatives and a seemingly endless list of specialized sites for just about any category you can think of. Keep this in mind the next time you're looking for something specific on the web. Happy searching!