Find what other search engines can’t
Niche search engines are search engines designed to find very specific types of content. You can use them to unearth hidden gems, discover untapped sources of information, and uncover resources that you never even knew existed.
While there are a handful of wildly popular search engines that do a great job at locating most images and web pages, they don’t always find what you’re after.
The need to showcase niche search engines comes out of the fact that search engines don’t search the entire web. The ones listed below are very specific in that they focus on things like books, medical information, images, math, videos, etc.
Mathematics and Science Search Engines
Whether you need to solve a complicated math problem or look up scholarly discussions of eclipses, the following search engines can help you find solutions to a wide variety of mathematical and science-related questions.
- Wolfram Alpha: This website has information and examples on math and science topics, among other subjects, and provides both a search engine and menus to browse through it all.
- PDR.net: Search for any drug to learn why it’s used, common brand names, dosage details, storage considerations, and more.
- Khan Academy: One of the best reference sites on the web, you can search for all sorts of math and science questions to see videos, articles, exercises, and programs you can take part in to learn more.
- SearchOnMath: This is a math search engine that runs your search through 11 million formulas on a variety of math-related websites.
- Google Scholar: A search engine from Google, this one provides one text box to search through tons of academic research.
Books and Printed Materials Search Engines
Whether you’re looking for a rare book, a used book, an audiobook, or a comic book, chances are you can find it on the web using one of these excellent book search engines.
- Google Books: This is the world’s most comprehensive index of text books.
- Manybooks: A search engine for sifting through tens of thousands of completely free books you can download.
- Open Culture: This is more of a web directory than a search engine, but it’s a great way to find updated audiobook downloads.
- Amazon: While there’s a ton of other products here, too, it’s one of the best places to find used and new books.
Social Networking Sites Search Engines
Search engines also exist within most social networking sites, plus there are cross-service search engines that can look for things on multiple social media sites simultaneously.
- Twitter and Facebook are two examples of social media sites that you can search through to find information regarding other users and the people you follow or are friends with.
- Social Searcher: A niche search engine for finding mentions, users, and trends across several social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube, and Reddit.
- Google Social Search: This unique search engine lets you pick which social media sites to search through, but it uses Google to gather the results.
Images and Multimedia
Whether you’re looking for an image or an obscure video, or you simply want to see the latest and greatest movie trailers, a search engine is a great place to start.
- Google Images: You can find nearly any image with Google Images because it scours through most of the observable web.
- Yahoo Image Search: Similar to Google’s image search engine is this one from Yahoo.
- Picsearch: Over 3 billion images are indexed here, and you can search through all of them from a single text box or by browsing the image gallery.
- Google Videos: This video search engine is similar to Google’s image search tool but finds only videos.
- YouTube’s site: Although it doesn’t technically search through multiple other sites at once like a true search engine, YouTube is the biggest video streaming site on the web, so it’s a great place to search for videos.
People and Family Search Engines
Finding people, communicating with people, keeping in touch with people….these activities are the most popular on the web, and with good reason. Connect with others you might have lost touch with underground people search engines.
- TruePeopleSearch: This is just one of several people search engines that help you locate someone online using just their name, email address, phone number, address, or username.
- BeenVerified: One of the most comprehensive people finder tools, this search engine lists the person’s addresses, email addresses, and lots more.
- FamilyTreeNow.com: This search engine is unique because while it’s a people finder tool, Family Tree Now is also a genealogy website for finding relatives.
Invisible Web Search Engines
An invisible web search engine finds content that a regular search engine doesn’t catalog. The invisible web, also called the deep web and hidden web, is a huge part of the web that you can’t find unless you use a special search engine.
