With these alternative search engines you search much more specifically

Google’s search engine has a market share of more than 90 percent with us. That’s a shame, because there are many other search engines and public sources that have more eye for your privacy. They also find specific information that you can hardly or not get at all via Google. This article introduces you to some alternative search engines.

Some users use multiple search engines. For example, they first try Google and if they don’t find what they’re looking for there, they also contact a search engine like Bing. So-called metasearch engines, or search aggregators, do this themselves. They automatically pass your search term on to multiple search engines, after which they retrieve the results to present them in the search results list in a clean way.

dogpile is an English-speaking metasearcher, with a somewhat turbulent history of about twenty-five years. This site passes on your search term to Google, Bing and Yahoo, among others. There are search sections for the web, images, videos and news. Aside from an explicit content filter, unfortunately there are hardly any options to set.

Also excite has been around for many years, but has already lost a lot of popularity. The web service uses Bing, among other things, but it is not so clear which other vessels the search engine taps. Just like with Dogpile, you can also set virtually no preferences here.

Metasearchers themselves search for results within multiple search engines

Scientific

Search engine WolframAlpha has unmistakably devoted himself to mathematical and scientific calculations. There is even a tool available that makes it easier to enter mathematical formulas. For example, enter the search term world population growth In addition to an interactive table, you will also see various other demographic data, such as life expectancy, annual births and male/female distribution. You can consult the sources used and click through immediately. on www.wolframalpha.com/examples you can go for inspiring examples.

If you have a Pro account (from $5.50 per month), you have more options at your disposal, such as adjusting the display or downloading the underlying data in various formats.

If you are more interested in academic publications, it is difficult to get out Google Scholar, with more than two hundred million articles in the database. Previously there was also Microsoft Academic, with a similar amount of articles, but unfortunately Microsoft pulled the plug on the project at the end of 2021. European counterparts include CORE (200 million documents) and the German BASE (280 million documents). All databases allow the documents to be exported to, among others, the BibTeX format and offer links to the full text in PDF format.

Fig share is also worth mentioning, because in this database most documents, reports, photos and videos are made available according to CC0 or CC BY (see the box ‘Creative Commons’). You can also upload your own data here.

Creative Commons

In this article, we list several fairly public sources. This means that everyone can go there for free to consult all kinds of information. But: read the license conditions carefully before using found documents or media material yourself.

For example, in order to be allowed to use material yourself, it must belong to the public domain. Think of works whose authors died more than seventy years ago. Whether it should be works released under a license, such as GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License), CC0 1.0, or CC BY(-SA) (4.0).

CC stands for Creative Commons, with different license types. After CC0, where there are no rights at all to the work, the most ‘free’ types are CC BY (for own use only an attribution is required) and CC BY-SA (requires both attribution and ‘share alike’, which means as much as: distributing under the same license form). More information can be found at www.creativecommons.nl/explanation†

Artistic

Almost every museum worthy of its name has a digital collection. To give just two impressive examples: the Louvre has nearly 500,000 works in its digital collection, and the Museum of the City of New York has digitized many tens of thousands of objects that allow you to explore the city’s past.

Are you looking for a work of art? Then a good general starting point is the Canadian artcyclopedia† This search engine doesn’t look very artistic, but you can find some 9,000 artists here, collected from almost 3,000 art sites and museums. You can search by name (of artist or museum) and by title of the work.

Similar in design, but with a focus on European (painting) art, the Hungarian The Web Gallery of Art, with approximately 51,000 works produced by some 4,000 artists. You may use the images for free for personal and educational purposes.

A must to watch is it Google Arts & Culture Project, featuring an online compilation of images of artworks from museums around the world. This often happens in story form, including virtual tours.

Literary

If you’re looking for literary works, you can’t go without Google Books† For this project, which started in 2004, Google has now scanned and digitized unimaginable amounts of books worldwide, especially from university libraries. Currently, more than 600,000 books from the Netherlands alone can be consulted online.

For e-books you have to be at Project Gutenberg† That now consists of a collection of more than 60,000 free e-books in epub and mobi format (Kindle). The focus here is on older works, especially American ones, which now belong to the public domain.

If you are more interested in classical Dutch literature, you can visit the online library of the Project Laurens Jz. coster† All available works are copyright free. No texts have been added since 2001, but the Digital Library for Dutch Literature has continued the digitization of these old works.

For the more contemporary e-books and audiobooks you can of course knock on the door of the online librarypart of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek.

Visual

Do you need an image for your document or website? While both Google and Bing search engines have an Images section, many of the results found are protected by copyright. You then have to filter by right of use or license. It works best with Bing: via License you can select a specific Creative Commons type, such as Public domain or May be customized† be shared and used commercially†

It is smarter to use the online collections of Pixabay (about 2.5 million photos) or Pxhere (about 1.25 million photos) to search for stock images in high resolutions. Both sites only offer free photos that you can use commercially and even edit. On both websites you can filter the results by criteria such as type, orientation, theme, dimensions and color. To be able to download a suitable photo, you must register for free.

Do you already have an image, but are you looking for something similar, then you can TinEye come in handy. You upload the image on the website or refer to the url of the photo and TinEye immediately starts looking for comparable copies.

Both Bing and Google also offer such a reverse search function. At Bing you press the button for this Search using an imageat Google that is Search by image† It should come as no surprise that such a function can also be useful for detecting any copyright violations.

Public

A lot of information is contained in the deep web (see the box at the bottom of this article ‘Dark web’) and this often also includes all kinds of public databases, which may or may not be freely consulted. A typical example of this is the Land Registry† Based on an address, you can request all kinds of information for a fee, such as who owns the property, what the purchase price and mortgage are, the housing report and the cadastral map. Here you will also find a link to a topographical time travel of about two hundred years.

On the website of the central government you will find countless information from the various ministries. Unless otherwise stated, the CC0 license applies here to the documents presented. Also interesting is the website of the NGR (National Georegister). Enter a search term and the intended location on this website about which you are looking for information or open one of the categories, such as nature and environment† economy† society or health† You can then further refine the information on, for example Licenses (among which public domain† CC0 and CC-BY† You can add all selected parts to a map as separate layers.

In Belgium you can consult the cadastral parcel plan for free via CadGIS† For more detailed information about your own properties, log in to MyMinfin† After that you can My home / Consult my real estate data Selecting. You can also request other cadastral extracts, but you have to pay for them.

dark web

In this article we discuss search engines and services that also allow you to search the deep web. These are information sources such as online databases, which are normally only accessible via a direct URL or IP address.

Even more hidden is the dark web. This consists of a whole series of hidden services with complex URLs in the so-called .onion domain. on www.thehiddenwiki.org you will find a list of search engines that operate within the dark web.

Tor2web proxies also allow you to browse the dark web with a regular browser. It suffices to enter the domain in the addresses.onion replace with for example .onion.ly†onion.pet or .onion.wsor by pasting the url on the webpage of 4everproxy† Unfortunately, such redirected connections are usually painfully slow and do not guarantee any anonymity.

If you really want to go on the dark web, you have the special one Tor Browser required (available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android). This allows you to address search engines such as Torch, Ahmia or Haystak. You have been warned: illegal or dubious websites are often only a mouse click away.