Today, Google is more than a synonym for search. It is used as a verb. You hear people tell you that they will google a place. This is the stranglehold that Google has on Indian internet users. And why not. Over 80% of Indian Internet users google the net.
But this does not mean that the search universe begins and ends with Google. There are plenty of search engines on the net. Many of them, like Googlers, have a loyal following.
You will realize their value only when you start using them.
These search engines can be divided into six categories based on their scope and focus.
# Category 1
Geographic: These are country-specific search engines that cater to the needs of their countrymen. The largest such search engine is Baidu. It is a Chinese search engine, and is ranked among the top five search engines in the world based on search volume. Some of the other geographic search engines are Yandex in Russia, Alleba in Philippines, and Sesame in Norway and Sweden. India too at one time had its very own search engine — Guruji.com. But it has shut down.
# Category 2
Metasearch engines: The Metasearch engines search the database of other search engines. These results are then displayed on a single search page. Some of the important metasearch engines are BrainBoost, Clusty, Dogpile, Excite, HotBot, Mamma and Web Crawler.
# Category 3
Blog search engines: The spiders of these search engines trawl the blogosphere and index the billions of words that are published on the blogs every day. Their search results are a very good indicator of popular blogs. Some of the popular blog search engines are Technorati, Bloglines, Blogpulse and Blogscope.
# Category 4
Question and Answer search engines: The question and answer search engines provide answers to questions posed by searchers. Answers.com, wikiHow, Yahoo! Answers, AskmeKnow and BrainBoost are some of the popular question and answer search engines.
# Category 5
Medical search engines: These search engines, as the name suggests, index information related to health and medicine. They are of immense value not only to medical practitioners but also to the common man looking for an answer to a medical problem. WebMed, Entrez, and BingHealth are three important medical search engines.
# Category 6
News search engines: These search engines are more like aggregators. They search the database of news sites to deliver relevant results. Some of the popular news search engines are Google News, Yahoo! News and Bing News.
Besides these broad categories, there are search engines that provide focused information on food, recipes, business, enterprise, legal matters, jobs etc. These have small databases, but they generate highly relevant results.
You must visit these search engines when you fail to find relevant information on a general search engine like Google or Bing.
It is good to know of the kinds of search engines.It also speaks of the lack of Indians to create a good search engines and or operating system. I remember a Google comment somewhere, Indians can if they mind make as good a search engine as Google. Unfortunately Indians prefer to be “highly paid coolies,” still!