Google just announced changes regarding what data it collects and integrates from your use of their 59 web site products, such as Gmail, YouTube, and Google+ services. This has caused a number of people to re-examine their use of Google products and quite a few to close their accounts to thwart the corporation from gathering more personal data than they give to close personal friends and family members.
There are other search engines out there. Here’s a look at a few lesser-known alternatives that you can use to search the internet in other ways.
Startpage.com bills itself as the world’s most private search engine. They promise they won’t record your IP address or share any personal info with any third party, and they provide you with Google search results. The European Union gave them a special “Privacy Seal” in recognition for their work.
Alexa.com is a company that’s been going since 1996. Alexa is good for searching for businesses. It also uses feedback from registered users to gather stats on how sites perform. The stats aren’t 100% accurate, but can be interesting at times.
Zoominfo.com is a search engine that focuses on business and people profiles. Search for a person and they’ll return biographical information and links to articles on the web that mention them. Same for companies.
Zabasearch.com is a people and phone number search engine. The results are a bit odd, and they often try to up-sell you on additional reports, but occasionally it can help lead you to what you are looking for online.
Omgili.com has an interesting twist: this search engine helps you find out what people are saying about something. It dives into communities, message boards and discussion threads to help you search forums.
Blekko.com promises spam-free searching of quality sites, with human curation of the links in their index. The site is nice and clean and results are pretty good.
Teoma is a good basic search engine with clean results. Teoma will suggest related searches to help you find what you may be after.
NNDB provides a graphical map of relationships among notable people. You can get lost in here following connections, and can view results by things like sexual orientation, political affiliation, and astrological sign. Definitely worth exploring if these things interest you.
AltaVista.com is an old favorite. This used to be one of the primary search engines back in the 1990’s, but they took a path of building internal systems for others and let Yahoo and Google fill the search space. Their search engine is still good and available for use.
Ask.com allows you to type a question and get answers from real people and web resources.
Dogpile.com is a product of InfoSpace that purports to save you time by aggregating results from Google, Yahoo, and Bing and compiling them on a single results page.
Whocalled.us is a way to find out who those “name unavailable” calls are from for those with Caller ID. Type in a phone number and see who was calling.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. The goal is to remind everyone that choices are available.
If you use a search engine that doesn’t get enough attention, feel free to add to the list.