We all know the usual suspects: Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Is that it? Are those the only options?
Let’s try these unusual search engines for sourcing.
Wolfram Alpha
As shown on the footer of the home page. A submitted query goes through natural language understanding, pulls results from curated data and knowledge, and runs through a dynamic algorithmic computation; resulting in a computed visual presentation.
Didn’t get it? Let’s try an example.
Enter the query: python engineer.
The result has these sections:
Input interpretation:
- computer software engineers
- people employed
- United States
Sub-specialties:
- computer software applications engineers
- People employed:
495,500 - Mean wage:
$90170 per year
Other sections have this data:
- Related occupations
- Standard occupational classification
SOC code
Let’s try another query. Start typing this: number of. It shows these suggestions:
- number of English speakers
- number of hours in 7 weeks
- number of partitions of 1250
- number of homes in Denver
- number of galaxies
Try the query: number of accountants in Chicago:
- Input interpretation:
accountants and auditors,people employed,Chicago-Naperville-Joliet - 32880 people
- Yearly change:
-13% - Median wage:
$64560
I had a hard time coming up with natural queries. The website has a page with examples. You can select a topic and get some ideas of queries that you can submit.
2lingual
With this search engine, you can search in two languages at the same time. Why would you need this? I thought about it too.
I set the options to search pages written in English and Spanish.
Then I used the query: hadoop engineer.
It shows two columns of results. English on the left. Spanish on the right.
A lot of interesting results on the right:
- ‘Big Data, lo que todo ingeniero deberia saber’: https://masqueingenieria.com
- ‘Trabajo ingeniero hadoop’: https://www.jobatus.es/
- ‘Ofertas de empleo Hadoop en Barcelona’: https://www.jobfluent.com
- ‘ingeniero hadoop hive spark python’: https://co.linkedin.com
In one of these results, I found a long list of users.
BizNar
A search engine to crawl the deep web. Information not crawled by your typical search engine:
- academic information
- scientific reports
- social media
- other resources not crawled by Google or Bing.
Let’s try this query: hedge fund manager
The results page has a variety of filters:
- Topics
- Author
- Publications
- Source
- Dates
- Document format
I clicked on the ‘Authors’ dropdown. It shows at least 100 authors. I selected one of these, and it showed my two results. One of them said IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Payments 2017 Predictions. I went to this result, and it opened a page describing an abstract from multiple authors. Some of their titles: Research Director Worldwide Blockchain, Research Director Consumer Banking, Associate VP Financial Insights.
Back on the full list of results. I filtered by, 2019, by Document type: Blog. The results now show only from Forbes. However, each result description contains a lot of information about hedge funds and managers.
It looks like Google and Bing aren’t the only options. Perhaps you can try something new.