There’s a popular list of alternative search engines being circulated on Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites. The posts usually start with the words “Google is so powerful that it ‘hides’ other search systems from us …”. I was trying to find it the other day for a friend and it’s obviously so widespread that Google’s A.I. even seemed to get a little defensive about it.
Okay, whatever.
Anyway, while I was trying to find a copy of the list to share from a site that wasn’t Facebook and that I was okay linking to, I noticed that the list varies somewhat in length from one place to another. Wanting a good list to choose from, I decided to put together my own and offer it here with some notes on each site.
So, if you’re tired of all the advertising and other clutter and actually want to get some honest-to-goodness online sources to research and reference, here are some of the other search engines that still exist on the web.
DuckDuckGo
The DuckDuckGo search engine promises complete privacy for your searches without the tracking and targeting that other companies like Google and Facebook usually do. They also have their own browser and e-mail system that blocks tracking attempts so, if online privacy is especially important to you, this is a well-known option to check out.
RefSeek.com
From the About page – “RefSeek is a web search engine for students and researchers that aims to make academic information easily accessible to everyone. RefSeek searches more than five billion documents, including web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals, and newspapers.”
RefSeek offers the fast and clean search results that might actually make you weep for the glory days of the Internet. There’s no advertising, no sponsored results and no AI summaries, just a list of sites that best match the keywords you entered. There is no submission process for websites; the engine searches the web itself and focuses on academic sites and pages rather than commercial results. There’s also a directory option that can provide lists of useful sources for your own review.
WorldCat.org
From the About page – “WorldCat.org is a resource for locating unique, trustworthy materials that you often can’t find anywhere except in a library. By connecting thousands of libraries’ collections in one place, WorldCat.org makes it easy for you to browse the world’s libraries from one search box.”
WorldCat is a search engine for books and other resources without the overload of advertising found on other sites like Amazon. As a bonus, once you find a title, you can find the nearest library or other lending resource where it’s available.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenburg is a free library of almost 76,000 eBooks, focusing mostly on literature and important documents such as the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Books can be downloaded in a variety of formats, including Kindle and ePub. I probably should have checked here before I bought my copy of Frankenstein.
HAL Open Science
From the about page: “HAL is a multidisciplinary open archive for sharing research results, both published and unpublished, in open access. It serves researchers affiliated with academic institutions, whether public or private. In France, HAL is the national archive chosen by the French scientific and academic community for the open dissemination of its research results. The archive is also accessible to chercheur.es affilié.es foreign academic institutions, both public and private.”
HAL Open Science is operated by the Centre for Direct Science Communication. Users are able to submit their own documents for inclusion and there is a basic vetting process to ensure that the documents actually represent research work and meet legal and copyright guidelines of the site but there is no peer-review to guarantee accuracy of information.
Springer Nature Link
From the About page – “As part of Springer Nature, Springer Nature Link delivers fast access to the depth and breadth of our online collection of journals, eBooks, reference works and protocols across a vast range of subject disciplines.”
It addition to being able to search millions of books and research papers, researchers can begin the publishing process for their own articles and books under Springer’s publishing brands. Springer also assists authors with publishing Open Access works under Creative Commons licensing.
Bioline International
This is a search engine that focuses on providing access to bioscience research materials. Results are grouped by country of origin. From the site: “Bioline International is a not-for-profit scholarly publishing cooperative committed to providing open access to quality research journals published in developing countries.”
BASE (Bielfeld Academic Search Engine)
From the site – “BASE is one of the world’s most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. The index contains more than 400 million records from more than 11,000 content providers. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed records for free (Open Access). BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.”
BASE is another search engine that focuses on research data. In this case, it does have a submission process for sites and documents but sources are checked by library personnel before being indexed on the site and held to specific requirements for inclusion. Search results include precise bibliographic information for reference. It claims to reference over 420 million documents from over 11,800 content providers.
Ecosia
The Ecosia search donates 80% of its advertising revenue to tree-planting charities and has sponsored the planting of over 230 million trees around the world. The search results are a combination of results from Yahoo, Bing, Google and Wikipedia but are delivered free of the noise you might have become accustomed to. They also have a browser extension and an A.I. chatbot.
Science.gov
Science.gov is an official website of the U.S. government that “provides access to millions
of authoritative scientific research results from U.S. federal agencies.” It represents federal agency members including the USDA, NASA, NIH and the USGS.
Yandex
Yandex is Russia’s largest search engine and provides a standard format of search results with some info boxes and links to Google and Bing results at the bottom. It does have an annoying habit of opening a lot of new browser tabs when the user clicks on the different search features such as maps and images. It also seemed to think my requests were automated after I’d run only a couple of searches and popped up a checkbox asking me to certify that I was human.
If you have other sites you’ve found helpful that aren’t included here, you’re welcome to send them to me and I’ll evaluate them to decide if they should be included here.
Article promotional photo provided by EVG Kowalievska:
https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-typing-on-laptop-1174775/
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