Mar
24
Written by:
host
3/24/2009 7:00 AM
Google is the most popular search engine, followed by Yahoo and MSN, and usually these are just fine for general searching. But sometimes, though, your search needs may be more unique, or you yearn for something other than pages of text to wade through. Here are some of the many other great options which might come in handy from time to time.
Viewzi offers you several unique ways to view the results of your searches. With options galore, you could spend more than an hour just trying each of them.
SearchMe has a great visual browser, plus a unique feature called "Stacks" that allows you to create and share groups of pages you like or regularly visit.
Zoomii is the site to visit if you're a book lover. It's what would happen if you could browse Amazon's books on visual, virtual shelves. Super cool!
WindowShop is designed to give you an audiovisual introduction to top-selling books, DVDs, video games, and more, so you can find out what you're missing.
PicClick turns eBay into a super visual shopping and searching experience. I prefer eBay's layout personally, but PicClick is good for those times you can identify what you want by sight as much or more than by description.
BriteClick is still in beta (i.e. in development and testing), and may turn out to be pretty cool. It's an add-on browser that allows you to do searches while still keeping other browser windows open. Watch the demo video, since it's a little hard to explain here.
TinEye is for people who create images. It allows you to find out who has "borrowed" your images, logos, or graphics. You might say it's what you'd get if Mr. Photo Recognition Software and Mrs. Search Engine had a baby.
SeeqPod is a search engine for tunes, allowing you to play music directly from the browser. Great for those times you want to preview an entire song before you purchase it, for example.
Shazam is another site for music lovers. Among its unique features is that you can play a portion of a song you've heard into it (from your cell phone) and it will tell you what song it is.
Finally, while it's not a search website, one of my favorite search tools is an application called DevonAgent. Available for Macs only, this tool performs really deep searches and does much, much more. It's superb for research papers or highly unusual search requirements.
Search technology is really exploding right now, and more and more options are becoming available. I'll continue to highlight some of these tools in the future.
~ Tim Gossett