While there are a handful of wildly popular search engines that do a great job at locating most images and web pages, they don’t always find what you’re after. The need to showcase niche search engines comes out of the fact that search engines don’t search the entire web. The ones listed below are very specific in that they focus on things like books, medical information, images, math, videos, etc.
Wolfram Alpha: This website has information and examples on math and science topics, among other subjects, and provides both a search engine and menus to browse through it all. PDR.net: Search for any drug to learn why it’s used, common brand names, dosage details, storage considerations, and more. Khan Academy: One of the best reference sites on the web, you can search for all kinds of math and science questions to see videos, articles, exercises, and programs you can take part in to learn more. SearchOnMath: This math search engine runs your query through several million formulas on a variety of math-related websites. Google Scholar: One of Google’s lesser-known search engines, this provides one text box to search through tons of academic research. Consensus: Uses AI to instantly extract findings directly from scientific research.
Twitter and Facebook are two examples of social media sites that you can search through to find information regarding other users and the people you follow or are friends with. Social Searcher: A niche search engine for finding mentions, users, and trends across several social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube, and Reddit.
Google Images: You can find nearly any image with Google Images because it scours through most of the observable web. Yahoo Image Search: Similar to Google’s, but it’s from Yahoo. Google Videos: This is similar to the company’s image search tool, but it finds only videos. YouTube: Although it doesn’t search through multiple other sites at once like a true search engine, YouTube is the biggest video streaming site on the web, so it’s a great place to search for videos. IMSDb: Search for text from movie scripts. This one isn’t technically multimedia, but it’s related.
TruePeopleSearch: This is just one of several people search engines that help you locate someone online using just their name, email address, phone number, address, or username. BeenVerified: One of the most comprehensive people finder tools, this search engine lists the person’s addresses, email addresses, and lots more. FamilyTreeNow.com: This search engine is unique because while it’s a people finder tool, Family Tree Now is also a genealogy website for finding relatives.
Wayback Machine: Find archives of web pages from years ago to just a few minutes in the past. The National Security Archive: Use this niche search engine to find declassified documents and other data regarding U.S. national security, foreign policy, military history, and more.
