Top 10 Alternatives To Google Search

Google is the big daddy of all the search engines. But when it comes to topic specific searches, Google may not give you the best results. There are various other search engines designed to derive results for topic specific search. Here is a list of 10 such search engines that can act like the perfect alternative to Google.

 
1. Guruji.com

 
Launched: October 16, 2006

 
Known for: specifically designed for India

 
Launched by Anurag Dod and Gaurav Mishra, two IIT Delhi engineers, guruji.com is a search engine designed especially for the Indian user. It scores over Google because of its language advantage. Users are able to type in their own vernacular languages instead of transcribing the vernacular term in English.

 
The search engine also provides users the services for searching images, services within a specific city, music, cricket, movie timing, and finance. Guruji.com will work because its search is region specific.

2. isoHunt

 
Launched: January 2003

 
Known for: One Of The Best BitTorrent Index

 
IsoHunt is a BitTorrent index with more than 1.7 billion torrents in its database. It is one of the most famous torrent search engines. Thousands of torrents are added to and deleted from it every day. Users of isoHunt perform over 40 million unique searches per month. The site has been involved in several lawsuits regarding copyright infringement. But the site founder, Gary Fung wishes to work with the content owners.

 
January 16, 2007, isoHunt was taken off-line but after a major hardware upgrade, the site resumed normal operation by January 22, 2007

3. Answers.com

 
Launched: 1999

 
Known for: Gives Consolidated Responses Taken From Several Sources

 
Answers.com was created in 1999 by Bob Rosenschein in Jerusalem, Israel. The website was then known as GuruNet.com which later acquired the Answers.com domain name. This search engine enables knowledge exchange which includes wiki WikiAnswers, ReferenceAnswers, VideoAnswers, and five international language Q&A communities.

 
This search engine intelligently and automatically integrates and retrieves information from disparate sources and delivers the result in a single consolidated view to the user. The searches can be made based on several categories.

4. Wolfram Alfa

 
Launched: May 15, 2009

 
Known for: Answering Factual Queries By Computing The Answer From Structured Data

 
Wolfram Alfa is where you go to find answers to very specific questions. Instead of giving a list of websites as answers this site gives users the specific responses. The website was developed by Wolfram Researches. Wolfram Alpha is based on the computational platform Mathematica, written by British scientist Stephen Wolfram in 1988.

 
Apple’s Siri uses Wolfram Alpha for 25% of its searches.

5. Pipl.com

 
Launched: October 2007

 
Known for: The Best Search Engine To Search People

 
As the name sounds this search engine lets users look for people. The searches are done based on the name and location provided by the searcher. Its results are much more accurate than those of Google is because they use ‘deep web’.

 
The website not only produces links to all the profiles on social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, blog mentions, and photos on Flickr but also finds mentions of the searched name in public records, including property records, SEC filings, and birth databases. It also finds e-mail addresses and summarizes “quick facts” about the person.

6. Yummly.com

 
Founded: January 2009

 
Known for: The Ultimate Guide For Food, Cooking And Recipes

 
Yummly is the quintessential search engine for food and recipes. It uses semantic search for search and ‘understands’ food on a variety of levels, allows users to search by ingredient, diet, allergy, nutrition, price, cuisine, time, taste, meal courses and sources, and ‘learns’ about users based on their likes and dislikes. Yummly uses this information to categorize food for search and make recommendations.

 
Yummly was founded by David Feller and Vadim Geshel in early 2009. Its headquarters are located in Palo Alto, California.

7. Scour.com

 
Founded: 1997

 
Known for: The Perfect Mix Of Search Plus Social Networking

 
Founded in 2007, Scour was originally named Aftervote.com, a search engine with an AJAX backbone with one mission: to deliver the most relevant results as efficiently as possible. Almost exactly 1 year later, Aftervote was acquired by Internext media, owner and operator of the ABCSearch Network and re-branded to Scour.com.

 
Scour’s aim is to find the perfect mix of search and social networking. Users are provided with a platform to vote and comment on relevancy.

8. Dogpile.com

 
Founded: November 1996

 
Known for: ‘Fetching Results’ From Other Search Engines

 
Dog pile is a metasearch engine that ‘fetches’ the best results from other search engines such as google, bing and yahoo. They also get results from video and audio hosting websites. The search engine is owned by InfoSpace Inc.

 
The idea behind creating dogpile.com was to save the user’s time by bringing the best results from other search engines together. The time-saving philosophy even inspired their name. In rugby, players come together and pile on top of one another. This is exactly what Dogpile does – it compiles all the best results in one easy-to-access place.

 
The In July 2010, Dogpile was ranked the 770th most popular website in the U.S., and 2548th most popular in the world by Alexa.

9. Goby.com

 
Founded: September 2009

 
Known for: Search Engine For Travel Specific Queries

 
Goby.com is a search engine for the traveler. It lets users search through 400 categories for things to do while they travel. Users are asked to input the kind of activity they want, their desired location and the desired date. Related results are shown accompanied with the maps of the area. Users can also share information using the Facebook connect option.

 
Goby was co-founded in July 2008 by noted database pioneer, Michael Stonebraker, Mark Watkins, Vince Russo, Andy Palmer, and Mujde Pamuk. The company received series A funding from Flybridge Capital Partners and Kepha Partners. The company is headquartered in Boston, MA.

10. Everystockphoto

 
Founded: April 2006

 
Known for: Search Engine For Photos

 
It is license specific search engine for photographs. It allows users to tag, rate, comment on or collect photos. The website has a collection of licensed photos accumulated from several sources which are presented in a systematic format to users.

 
The website is owned by Vibrant Software, located in Vancouver, Canada. The site is also connected to twitter. They also have their own blog and news feed.

7 Real Reasons Why Facebook Is Headed For a "Public" Disaster

Well, all the IPO celebrations are over and now it’s the time to think, may be re-think. After all the hypes and predictions about a historic IPO, Facebook’s public appearance turned out to be a flat one with merely a $0.23 jump in share price. And with the latest reports of its shares going down, many fear the social networking giant is headed towards an IPO disaster.

 
Even though Facebook’s opening day at NASDAQ had all the excitement, glamour and glitz, no one really knows what caused the poor landing and the drama’s happening right now. Here are a handful of reasons.

 
#1 It Was Too Late

 
Everybody has been taking aboutFacebook’s IPO at least from the last 12 months. But it came too late, after keeping its shares frozen for a long time. Even the investors had bid up for the $100 billion value an year ago. Facebook was not waiting for the right time, maybe it’s due to Zuckerberg’s hesitation to take his company public.

#2 Zuckerberg and Investors

 
Everybody knows one thing- Zuckerberg never wanted to take his company public. In the IPO road-show that the company conducted earlier this month, it became clear. The 28 year old chief executive reportedly made many investors angry by arriving late to the event and keeping them waited. He also skipped many stage shows in the following day which he was supposed to attend. Zuckerberg was also criticized for wearing his hoodie into the stage. As a Forbes writer states it “Zuckerberg’s view of shareholders is like President Obama’s view of blue collar workers. He needs them but secretly laughs at them.”

#3 Facebook Left Nothing For Ordinary Investor

 
The Facebook’s entire shares are looted by the Celebrity Silicon Valley Angels and the Private Equity firms. It left no bite to the common investor. It was not the celebrity Angels who made Microsoft and Google its valuation. Microsoft’s market value was 780 million, when it went public in 1986. It made many ordinary public investors a millionaire in its next 13 years by a 700 times jump in valuation. Even Google’s story was somewhat similar. But when it came to Facebook, Zuckerberg and his friends took it all.

#4 Facebook Debuted in May

 
May is always considered as the bad time to go public. Even though this stock market belief, “Sell in May and Go Away” is largely ignored, for the past few years, almost all of the stock market gains are occurred in time period from October to May. And for Facebook, who made the debut in a cloudy situation, the saying is turning out to be true.

#5 Facebook Boredom is Growing

 
According to the statistics, Facebook is nearing to 1 billion members. But what about the growing Facebook boredom, particularly among the professionals? The social network has reportedly lost 6 million U.S. users in last May and according to a recent study, the engagement of the above-25 year-old people with the website is decreasing. With Facebook’s removal of ban for under-13- year- olds joining the site, the number may eventually reach billion. But finally, it’s not about the numbers alone.

#6 Facebook (Investment) is Not Necessary

 
As the great investor Warren Buffett states it, “investing in tech companies is never easy. It’s about necessity, not the PE values.” There are many companies like IBM, Cisco, Google, Intel and SAP which the world economy depends on. We can live without them for sure, but the switching cost will be high. On the other hand, Facebook is a social network which is not integral to the global economy.

#7 After All, it’s Another Social Network

 
Facebook makes 90 percent of its money from advertisements. The network purely runs understanding your tastes and feelings. One enters and uses the network mainly for time pass rather than for a purpose. On the other hand, a network like linkedIn has a special purpose and a professional doesn’t feel like wasting his time. There may arise plenty other social networks in the near future, which targets a particular population in the billions like the recently launched social network for the dying!     

Craziest Facts about Facebook that You Would Want to Know

Amidst so many things said and heard, Business insider has collected some crazy facts about Facebook that have made the company a treat for the readers.

 
Let’s take a look at 26 such facts that kept the giant social network in the news.

 


 
1. Facebooks Worth would be more than eBay, Yahoo, Groupon, LinkedIn, Netflix, IAC, AOL, Zynga and Pandora combined, when

it goes public

 

.

 
2. Eduardo Saverin, the Brazilian co founder of Facebook has renounced his US citizenship and is now investing billions in startups at Singapore.

 


 
3. Of all the incredible talents that Zuckerberg is bestowed with, his greatest and what seems to be his favorite is Firing People.

 


 

4. About 60 percent of the voting power at Facebook is controlled by Zuckerberg.

5. The big shot media company Viacom had offered to acquire Facebook, but was rejected by Mark Zuckerberg.

 

6. After agreeing to an acquisition offer from Yahoo while it was led by Terry Semel, Facebook staepped down from the deal when there were talks of lowering the offer price.

 


 

 

7. The Microsoft CEO, steve Ballmer had offered to buy Facebook. Steve has invested $240 million in Facebook till date.


 
8. Facebook interviewed Yahoo executive Ellen Siminoff, Apple veteran Bud Colligan, and former OpenTable CEO Jeff Jordan for the position of COO which is now held by Sheryl Sandberg.


9. Steve jobs had to cancel the presentation that he had offered Facebook for the iphone application in 2008. Jobs, who had expected Zuckerberg to do the presentation was disappointed by the audition of the engineer who was selected by the Facebook CEO.

 


10. Maintaining his reputation of having a a bad fashion sense, Zuckerberg wore a hoodie to the meeting with wall street investors.

 


 

11. In 2005, Mark Zuckerberg took CEO lessons to improve his managerial skills.

 

12. Mark Zuckerberg is said to be a big time Glee fan.