Forget About Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Google, Yahoo, and MSN Live are without a doubt the largest and most trusted search engines on the net. It's important to realize that although the "Big Three" are popular search engines, each in their own right, alternatives exist that can produce equal or better results...especially when used together. I've listed 25 search engines, social media, and other sources anyone can use to find the information they need.

The "Other" Search Engines

Presenting one of the largest indexes in the world, Gigablast Inc. has joined the elite ranks of major search engine companies. Founded by Matt Wells in 2000, Gigablast has been engineered to index up to 200 Billion pages with a minimal amount of cost and hardware.

Additional Resources: About | Advanced Search

According to Ask.com...it's all about the algorithm or "algo" for short. Their "ExpertRank" algorithm provides relevant search results by identifying the most authoritative sites on the Web. We gave Ask a try and found the results were quite relevant to terms searched .

Additional Resources: About | Advanced Search

A9's appearance is very "Web 2.0" and the presentation of their results is like no other. Unique in that for every search executed, a user can choose to see not only relavant websites, but also related books, amazon products, and news and events...all within the same page.

Additional Resources: About

Nicely done with unique results. Exalead was founded in 2000 and has since indexed over 4 billion pages. Not only is Exalead a rising star in the search market but a respected developer of enterprise grade software. Their software is used by leading companies worldwide.

Additional Resources: About | Advanced Search

Take a look at Snap.com and you'll find an attractive website with many options. Snap returns text results to the left and a corresponding image of each website to the right. Snap's features and ease of use do make up for the seemingly lacking results.

Additional Resources: About | Blog

Meta Search Engines

So what's a meta searchengine? The single defining characteristic of all meta search engines is that they derive their search results from other search engines. The way in which each interprets those results is what separates the good from the bad. There are literally thousands of meta search engines on the net...we've included a few that are well established and reliable.

Clusty pulls in results from several top search engines, combines the results, and generates an ordered list based on comparative ranking. Instead of delivering millions of search results in one long list, Clusty groups similar results together into clusters. These clusters can be found in the upper left hand corner of the search results which allows you to see your search results by topic so you can zero in on exactly what you’re looking for or discover unexpected relationships between items.

Additional Resources: About | Advanced Search

Mamma.com is one of the most popular and well established search sites on the Web that simultaneously searches a variety of engines, directories, and deep content sites. Copernic also operates Mamma Health, Mamma Jobs, and Mamma Videos providing users with the added benefit of searching vertically as opposed to searching the entire web for jobs, videos and health related issues.

Additional Resources: About | Advanced Search

MetaCrawler uses metasearch technology to search the Internet's top search engines, including Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN Search, Ask Jeeves, About, MIVA, LookSmart and more. With a click, MetaCrawler searches the best results from the combined pool of the world's leading search engines -- instead of results from only one single search engine. And MetaCrawler makes it easy to refine your search so you can find the most meaningful results right away.

Additional Resources: About | Advanced Search

Of the search engines profiled, DogPile wins the personallity contest. And the results look pretty good too. Dogpile pulls together the power of all the leading search engines together in one search to present the best combined results.

Additional Resources: About

Search The Blogosphere

Blog aggregators and sydicates crawl and index millions of blog posts a day and then present those results however they choose...often much like search engine results we're all accustomed too. The benefit here is that although blog posts are subjective, many can point you to the authoritative information. On the other hand, they can also be a great way to find the "latest and greatest" in your niche or in the world.

Technorati first came onto the scene in 2000 and has since become the largest blog sydicate on the net. Technorati searchs throught blogs...exclusively. Tracking more than 24 million blogs and indexing well over a billion posts/articles.

Additional Resources: About | Blog

Blog Catalog is one of the more prominent blog directories on the internet. With thousands of blogs listed in hundreds (may thousands) of categories most can locate something of interest. Whether you're looking to promote your own blog, find blogs on various topics, or connect with other bloggers this site is for you.

Additional Resources: About | Blog

Bloglines makes millions of blog post available users in real time. You can create your own personalized news page crafted to your interests from an index of millions of live internet content feeds, including articles, blogs, images and audio.

Additional Resources: About

By eliminating tagging and voting, Spotplex more accurately represents content by ranking sites based on real time reader behavior, placing the most read and informative articles at the top. This impartial approach ensures users will be present with the best and brightest information online.

The Social scene

Social media has become one of the most influential and dynamic forces on the web. What began as basic bookmarking sites has exploded into communities with millions of members and billions of sites/pages bookmarked or "indexed". The key benefit to using "Social Sites" to find information is that most of the junk has been filter one way or the other. This is not to say that everything you'll find is grade "A" quality content, but only to note that most of the information has been reviewed/filter (in the form of votes or other means) by real people.

Almost as prevelant as Google, Yahoo, and MSN - Digg is a community based social bookmarking site were members digg their favorite articles, videos, podcasts and then other members can vote or bury the original digg. The end result is the cream rises to the top by displaying the most voted for content first.

Additional Resources: About | Blog

The grandaddy of social bookmarking. Del.icio.us may or may not be the first social bookmarking site but there's no question that it's the most popular and longest stand site of its kind. There's no voting on bookmarks...the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere in the world.

Additional Resources: About | Blog

Simpy indexes your bookmarks and lets you search them and those of other simpy members. By using tags to create virtual "folders" on the fly, Simpy has eliminated the need for cumbersome and often confusing category structures.

Additional Resources: About | Blog

Using the same voting model as Digg.com, Reddit is a well known and widely popular social bookmarking site. Unlike Digg, Reddit's filters (based on your votes) learn your likes and dislikes and present content to you based on your votes.

Additional Resources: About | Blog

StumbleUpon uses ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. In practice StumbleUpon is not too different from other social bookmarking sites except for it's strong focus on community envolvment by providing all the means necessary to communicate with fellow stumblers. In terms of social media, StumbleUpon is by far the most efficient site on the net when it comes to weeding out the trash to find quality sites and content.

Additional Resources: About | Blog

Forums - The True Spirt of Community

Forums have been around for nearly as long as the web has been in existence. Some longstanding forums have 100s of thousands of members and millions (even billions) of posts. The point to make here is that generally speaking...each forum covers a particular niche or topic. If your searching for information about fish aquariums, then finding and joining a forum related to aquariums could be beneficial. By joining, you would have the opportunity to interact, exchange ideas, and learn from others...search engines just don't allow for that...the first two anyway.

In their words - "Omgili is a crawler based, vertical search engine that scans millions of online discussions worldwide in over 100,000 boards, forums and other discussion based resources. Omgili knows to analyze and differentiate between discussion entities such as topic, title, replies and discussion date." Truely a fantastic tool for finding information. Subjective or not, Omgili will reveal information a person would likely never find with the basic search.

Additional Resources: About | Blog

Big-Boards.com basically breaks down to a HUGE forum directory. All topics, any genre, and any way you want it. Beware - this site is adult material friendly and the title of the forum doesn't always depict the content. From a search standpoint, this site is an amazing resource that categorizes thousands of forums and billions of posts.

Additional Resources: About

Miscellaneous - They didn't fit any particular type, but definitely worth a look

If nothing else this site is unique. Kartoo is the only search engine that I've seen that's built entirely of Flash, which displays its results as an interactive map, much like a roadmap where the cities are replaced by Websites and the roads by lines connecting related websites. Be warned - If you are on dialup, using the flash version isn't an option. They do offer a text version though.

Additional Resources: About

70,000 how-to articles and 8 million visits a month can't wrong. eHow is a community driven website where experts outlining the basics - from how to start up a jet airliner to kissing on the first date. ehow is hands down one of the coolest sites in cyberspace.

Additional Resources: About

Zillow (name morphed from "zillions" and "pillow") is one of the largest online indexes of properties for sale in (and around) the world. Brought to you by the same fine folks that hatched Expedia, Zillow lists over 70 million properties and doesn't cost a dime to use.

Additional Resources: About | Blog

In their own words - "Answers.com is your free "one-stop shop" with instant information on over 4 million topics" Pretty much covers the introduction! It's nearly impossible to spend time on this site and not "walk away" with new found knowledge.

Additional Resources: About

First they put the "pedia" into "wiki" and now they've but the "wiki" into "seek". Wikipedia has launched a new search engine built to search the massive database of articles and information found within wikipedia. Although the results are limited to data found in wikipedia only (including external links), there's talk that if it expands, Wikiseek could be a "Google Killer" Not likely but who knows?

Additional Resources: About

Wrapping Up

By using the sites above, anyone should be able to find anything...and if you can't...let me know and I'll find it for you.:)