Over the past decade, Google has grown from a tiny search engine into the world’s most popular search engine solution. During this time, it has also invested in a variety of other products and services, making it one of the largest companies in the world. For those of you who love Google, you may still have a bit of an issue with some its decisions: namely, how it handles privacy and your information. In some cases, there is a need to perform searches that Google simply cannot do as effectively as other search engines, but did you know that other solutions even exist? If you are ready to give something other than Google a try, then continue reading to find out more about a few different and unique search engines.

Blekko

One of the most popular alternative search engines out there, Blekko uses algorithms that are much different than Google to fetch information. When you are pinging search engines for information, you are used to seeing some results that simply are not relevant. For instance, a search for “black hightops” may produce results for black shoes and hightops, but all results won’t necessarily be for black hightops. Blekko allows users to search via a “slashtag” function, which allows you to categorize the search. You can perform a search for “hightops/black” in order to more accurately limit the results presented to you – great for precise and niche queries.

BuzzSumo

If you are in the business of content marketing, then BuzzSumo may be an excellent choice. You can quickly use BuzzSumo to see what your competitors are doing, which links are performing best on social media and the top influencers for specific topics across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and elsewhere. There are few networks out there that can ping social media networks and determine who and what is performing well better than BuzzSumo.

Quantcast

Pinging search engines for more precise data – demography, social statistics and even transportation related figures – can be a bit frustrating in some cases. Quantcast revolutionizes the search process by catering solely to these variables. Anyone who needs to see traffic times in a particular city, demographic characteristics for a country or crime reports in a neighbourhood will find Quantcast to be quite helpful. Its basic interface is usually enough for most searches, but you can get more ideas and innovation by using the “Browse Rankings” feature, which lists the most popular types of search currently on the search engine.

CC Search

Those who love to produce and distribute content know how frustrating it can be to find free media in the public domain, but CC Search is a search engine developed explicitly for that. You’ll be able to run searches across dozens of different directories, including Google Images, YouTube, Wikimedia, Fotopedia and more. You can run a search for commercial or individual purposes to be sure you’re in compliance, or even search for content that is open-source and can be legally adapted to meet your content-driven or multimedia-related needs.