Improve your search result by using these google alternatives.

Most of us rely on google for all of our search results, but guess what there are powerful alternatives which challenge google in specific areas, google is a great general search but what if you have more specific results in mind such as video, music, people, business or podcasts . I have categorised some of my favourites below to help you search smarter.

Please let me know if i have missed out any which you feel should be added to the list.

Video Search:

www.blinkx.com - a powerful video search tool boasting 14 million hours of searchable TV content.

www.truveo.com - Time based video search - very cool
www.Altavista.com/video - Searched many types of online video files such as quicktime, MPEG, AVI's etc

www.uLinkx.com - Video search results returned by category from youTube, MySpace, Revver and many more...

Music & Podcast Search:

www.seeqpod.com - Get playable results in audio format returned in super quick time.

www.espew.com - A great MP3 search engine
http://hypem.com - Search for song or artists.
www.everyZing.com - A very clever search engine that looks for search terms inside audio podcasts and video clips using speech to text technology.

Image Search:
www.picsearch.co.uk - Returns thumbnails of all images found with details of where they are hosted.

www.Flickr.com - Can you believe they have over 1 billion images. The daddy of online images.

News Search :
www.wikio.com - Pulls the latest headlines from a range of media sources and blogs

www.topix.net - Search for local or global news with postcode and town name search.

People Search :

www.pipl.com - A very comprehensive search engine that looks for people on google but also looks inside documents and databases.
www.spock.com - Spock searches all the main social networking sites and wikipedia for people.

www.wink.com - Be careful typing this one into your browser at work ;-). Claims to search over 200 million people across all the main social networks.

http://yoname.com - Searches 26 social websites for last names, usernames and email address.

www.wikiyou.com - Wikipedia for people so the person need to be added for data to be searched.

User Generated Search :
www.aftervote.com - Vote for your favourites search results across google, yahoo and microsoft Live.

www.sproose.com - You can improve results similar to aftervote by voting for your favourite and adding comments.

www.mahalo.com - There are 40 people behind the scenes collating the best results for your search query or get paid to participate by adding your own search results.
www.chacha.com - bringing the personal touch back into search. They provide normal search results but if you click the search by guide button you can have a personal search agent help you find what your looking for.

Blog Search :

www.icerocket.com - Ice rocket finds blog posts by keyword and results are ordered by date posted.

www.technorati.com - the grand master of blog searching. By the far the best i have used - need i say more.

http://uk.ask.com - Search blogs, rss feeds and news stories and results can be sorted by date, relevence and popularity.

www.blogdimension.com/en - Search blogs and microblogs such as twitter, forums, news feeds, podcasts, videos and images.

Get Answers to those annoying questions :

www.answers.com - This site provides answers on over 4 million topics.

http://answers.yahoo.com - Ask your question here and all get answers from other users. People who provide answers get points and can be rated by the person who asked the question. I find this very useful.

New Ways to search.

Lots of companies are developing innovative new ways to help you find what you are looking for online. Below are some examples that might be of use next time you are doing a search.

www.snap.com delivers thumbnail previews of all search results from a link or an image. Or try www.quintura.com for a more visual search site in a cloud format. You can also try www.clusty.com to cluster your results by category and finally www.searchmash.com for multisource results.

I hope these resources help you search a little smarter next time you are looking for that crucial information online.

Thanks

Craig