Alternative+Search+Engines


 * Alternative Search Engines **

**Sweet Search** @http://www.sweetsearch.com

 * Audience**: Created for students, teacher librarians, and teachers but is useful to generalists and specialists of all ages.
 * Special Features:** Extensive "on this day" asides/sidebars; contains "Yo Link", enabling users to easily bookmark or share the content of the search results, while highlighting the key words of your search; links for: emerging learners, teacher librarians, specifically for biographies, and research training for students.
 * Scope of Results:** Searches only the 35,000 Web sites that its staff of research experts and librarians and teachers have evaluated and approved when creating the content on [|findingDulcinea]. They constantly evaluate search results and "fine-tune" them, by increasing the ranking of Web sites from organizations such as the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, PBS and university Web sites.
 * Ease of Use:** Interface is very similar to Google--clean, uncluttered, well-organized, and simple to use and navigate.
 * Recommendation:** I liked that **it's a safe search site for students** and everyone alike (e.g. I searched "see venus with the naked eye", and no trash popped up--only results related to astronomy.). There wasn't anything I disliked, really. It's a great site for bookmarking, sharing, and allows you to easily filter and trash your unwanted results. Great site.

**Search Cube** @http://search-cube.com
Target Audience: Very visual people. Not elementary or middle school students, for sure. Special Features: Includes videos in results; results displayed in a cube. Scope of Results: Mostly videos and images, some articles. Ease of Use: Looks neat, but kind of confusing to understand and navigate, had to go back to the home page to understand. What I Like: Good resource for finding images & videos. What You Didn't Like: Navigation confusing at first; I wish it had more clear organization (separate images from videos).

**Insta.Found** []

 * General audience of web surfers
 * Scope small, as it limits the results to one, usually wiki
 * Special Feature: That Was So 2009 link
 * Easy to use
 * I like it for casual, quick fact searching, but it hardly seems worth switching from Google

**Quintura** []
Audience--teens to adults (separate page for kids). ====Scope--This website has great wordclouds for you to use on each topic. The content is not filtered, although I belive the kids companion site is. It has sections for both video and images and is very user-friendly because the word clouds help you refine your search.==== Like--Word clouds, ease of use, user-friendly design,

Dislike--The websites aren't always of the best quality. Wikipedia is often the first website to pop up in many searches, however, you can find other higher-quality sites also.

**DuckDuckGo** []

 * Target audience: For the adult user
 * Special features: links on the home page
 * Scope of results: good results
 * Ease of use: very googleish
 * Recommendation: not for children due to no filters
 * What you liked: links on home page
 * What you didn’t like: the name and logo makes it appealing to children yet no filters

**Factbites** []

 * This site is most appropriate for adult users.
 * It did not produce alot of up to date information.
 * Alot of the links are out of date

**Exalead** []
Audience: all ages Scope: a general search engine that does not return as many results as Google Special Features: Search results include a thumbnail of the page. Users can limit their search results to filetype, sitetype, multimedia, and languages. Users can also search for images and videos, images by size, color, realism, filetype, and orientation. Ease of use: Very easy, very much like Google What I liked: The thumbnail of the page, search-limiting capabilities What I disliked: Really nothing, except that it doesn't return as many results as Google

**GigaBlast** [|http://www.gigablast.com]
Audience: the general public Special Features: Advance search, some alternate keywords, directory, links to other search engines, engine claims to be earth friendly. Scope of results: My first results seemed to be from reputable sources. Ease of use: The basic search engine is easy to use. What I liked: The ease of the basic search engine What I didn't like: The advance search did not return results I was looking for, in fact, it geared further away. The alternate keywords seemed to be from paid sources. Cannot jump from page to page.

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 * Audience- teens to adults
 * Scope- searches sixteen different social media sites
 * Special features
 * searches multiple sites at once
 * ability to move between results from different sites without leaving main page
 * gives some photo results
 * can tag results on personal social bookmarking site or blog
 * Ease of use
 * easy to type in keyword and access results, not easy to sort through results and use extra features.
 * there is no help page or FAQ page
 * What I liked
 * it searches multiples sites at once
 * ability to move back and forth between results without leaving main screen
 * What I didn't like
 * no sorting for relevancy
 * no help page
 * some of the sites often encountered problems and wouldn't bring up any results
 * this site takes some getting used to and would require a lot of practice for the new user

[]

 * Special Features: includes and encyclopedia that creates articles based on information found with web crawlers - cepedia; also provides historical timelines and search terms that may be similar to what you are searching ( like when amazon makes suggestions based on previous purchases)
 * Scope of Results: similar results to Google, but without the ads because they are owned by investors
 * Ease of Use: pretty easy, page is uncluttered
 * Recommendation: I would recommend the use of the search engine, but not the encyclopedia
 * What I liked: it is easy to use, and the extra historical information is great
 * What I didn't like: the encyclopedia feature is awful - I put my own name in to test it, and got A LOT of incorrect information....scary

**Zuula** []

 * ====easy results from all the top search engines- Google, yahoo, Bing, exalead, twitter, etc.====
 * ====can search the web, images, videos, news, blogs, and job searches====

**Quintura for Kids** []

 * Kid friendly, simple search box and interface
 * Word Cloud with related topics, changes with each search
 * Only searches specific websites to avoid "adult" content