# Off beat search engines

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/off-beat-search-engines/219244>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [December 16, 2003, 3:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/off-beat-search-engines/219244 "2003-12-16T03:08:39Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Markxxx](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5daacb/32.png) [@Markxxx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Markxxx)\
**Post date:** [December 16, 2003, 3:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/off-beat-search-engines/219244/1 "2003-12-16T03:08:39Z")

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I know all about the main ones like Google, Alta Vista, Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, Hotbot, Dogpile, Ask Jeeves, Infoseek, MSN etc…

I was reading in an almanac and they gave the name of some other search engines that listed “off beat” informaton or information that is not readily available on main search engines. However all the links listed were dead?

Anyone know of some off beat search engines and what they look for?

You can tell I’m bored.

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**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\
**Post date:** [December 16, 2003, 3:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/off-beat-search-engines/219244/2 "2003-12-16T03:56:43Z")

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You might be able to find some more specialist engines at a meta-search engine like Dogpile. (A meta-search engine is a search engine that polls multiple search engines and collates all of their results. I don’t use them because Google is usually better than any twelve other engines combined for the things I want, and Google is acting `behind the scenes’ to feed results to more than a few engines anyway.)

If you give us a reasonably broad topic, I’m sure we could dig up a few engines that specialize in that topic. For example, [ibiblio.org](http://ibiblio.org) is a great site for literature and dictionaries and other generally high-brow intellectual stuff.

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**Author:** ![TheLoadedDog](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/35a633/32.png) [@TheLoadedDog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TheLoadedDog)\
**Post date:** [December 16, 2003, 11:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/off-beat-search-engines/219244/3 "2003-12-16T11:33:05Z")

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[Search Bastard](http://www.searchbastard.com/)  
(warning: may not be work safe)

It’s just a regular search engine as far as results go. In fact, it’s not even a very good one. But it’s er… fun.