This is a guide to niche search engines, which are those that serve a specific purpose rather than a general one.
Smaller search engines are often identified as niche search engines too but, for the sake of categorization here, we are identifying niche search engines as those whose purpose is more specific than indexing the Web. General search engines are considered search engines, regardless of their size, while specialized search engines will be categorized as niche.
Niche search engines are tools that can be used to find specific resources. Niche engines may use preselected sources that are specifically relevant to the niche that they occupy.
Examples of niche search engines include Boardreader, which is focused on spidering the content of online forums, bulletin board systems, and news sources, which are often missed or improperly indexed by general search engines. Another is Sweet Search; designed for students, it searches only sites that have been approved by research experts, librarians, and teachers.
Niche search engines are specific, but not necessarily small in scope. Google Scholar indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature, as well as court opinions and patents. It allows users to research digital or physical copies of articles online or in libraries, indexing the full text of journal articles, technical reports, theses, books, and other documents.
Similar to Google Images in some respects, TinEye is a reverse image search that uses image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks to identify the origins of an image. Often, it is able to even match versions of the image that have been heavily edited. Unlike Google Images, it does not return similar images in its results.
Niche search sites have been set up to serve the needs of people of various religious persuasions, as well. While many of them are not true search engines, offering nothing more than filtered content from another search engine or search engines, SeekFind is a true search engine that doesn't seek to be a Christian version of Google, or to index every Christian website on the Internet, but to select websites for its index that offer useful information from an evangelical Christian perspective, allowing Christians to research biblical, religious, spiritual, and theological topics without mixing in anti-biblical viewpoints.
Million Short is a Toronto-based search engine that allows users to filter the top million websites on the Internet out of their search, resulting in a set of results from pages that don't show up in regular search engines. Referring to itself as more of a discovery engine, the intent is to reduce the effect that aggressive SEO practices may have on regular search results.
These are a few examples of the types of search engines that would be placed in the Niche Search Engines category. Someone looking for broad information from as many sources as possible will do better with a mainstream general search engine like Google or Bing. However, someone who knows what they are looking for, but not necessarily where it is located, might do well with a niche search engine.
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Originally known as Ask Jeeves, the search site was rebranded as Ask in the mid-2000s, when it became a true search engine. Unable to compete with Google, Ask Media Group abandoned the search industry in 2010 and returned to the question and answer format that it began with in 1996. Queries formed as questioned are answered through a database of answers from real people but supplemented by Web content from a third-party search engine.
https://www.ask.com/
CC Search is a tool that allows users to find openly licensed and public domain works. The search engine searches across more than three hundred million images from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset, reaching beyond mere search to aggregate results across multiple public repositories into a single catalog. Currently, the search engine only searches images, but there are plans to add additional media types, such as open texts and audio. Its policies and plans are stated.
https://search.creativecommons.org/
Giphy is a search engine and database that specializes in finding and allowing other users to share short looping videos with no sound, which resemble animated GIF files. The site began in 2013 as a search engine for GIFs, then expanded to allow users to post, embed, and share GIFs, and also partners with brands to host GIFs that can be shared on social media. Besides using its search field, users may also browse entertainment, sports, stickers, and artists.
https://giphy.com/
The ISBN Database holds more than twenty million titles, and growing, compiling various data points for each book, and making that information available to users on ISBNdb and any apps that use its API. Users can search by ISBN, title, author, publication date, and other points. The niche search engine employs bots that crawl libraries, publishers, and other websites, gathering the information that is added to its database. Members may use the ISBNdb API on their website, for a fee.
https://isbndb.com/
JustWatch is a streaming search engine, on which a user may determine whether a particular movie is available to view through streaming video. Information is available for several countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America. Users may filter results according to a variety of variables, such as new, popular, or on a specified watchlist, or by such criteria as movies, TV shows, genres, release year, price, or age ratings.
https://www.justwatch.com/
Launched in 2012, the Canadian-based search engine was created by Exponential Labs, which currently owns the site. The search engine utilizes its own search technology and web-crawling capabilities, drawing results from its own proprietary data, but encourages and allows users to filter the top 100, and up to a million, websites from its results, the idea being to yield a unique set of results that reduce the effects that aggressive search engine optimization have on mainstream searches.
https://millionshort.com/
Founded in 1993, MRQE is a search engine and database of movie reviews, offering a searchable index of published reviews, movie news, interviews, and other information related to the movies, all available through its search portal. Its metric and critics’ graph is defined here. Through its partnership with GoWatchIt, users can find where a particular film is currently playing across a number of platforms, including theaters, on DVD, online, or upcoming.
https://www.mrqe.com/
Established in 2018, Ololo is a video streaming search engine, whose bot crawls thousands of pages each day looking for new streaming links. By default, search results are ordered by relevance and may contain any word of the query. A search guide is available, and users may opt to view the top searches made. Webmasters are invited to use Ololo in their projects, including stream embed or the insertion of a script that will invite Ololo's bot to crawl the site for video links.
https://ololo.to/
Based in Stockholm, Sweden, Picsearch develops and provides image search services for large websites. Its search engine uses its own technology to crawl the web and create a searchable index of images. When a query is made by a user, the family-friendly search engine returns results in the form of thumbnail images that are sorted by relevancy. When a user clicks on a thumbnail, their browser will bring up the original site where the image is located.
https://www.picsearch.com/
Created in 2005, SeekFind is a search engine that returns search results only from vetted, evangelical Christian websites, allowing for biblical, theological, spiritual, and religious research that isn’t mixed with anti-Christian or non-biblical influences. New resource sites may be submitted to the search engine for consideration of inclusion in its index. Other topics include a statement of faith, policy information, and a list of online resources that are included.
http://www.seekfind.org/
In operation since 2009, Sweet Search uses the Google index, but searches only a vetted whitelist of source websites, created by librarians, educators, and researchers, presenting users with relevant sites from credible resources, without wading through spam sites and marginal sites that lack academic rigor. Users have the choice to search the vetted Web, historical resources, news, as well as an online course known as Choose 2 Matter.
https://sweetsearch.com/
Based in Canada, TinEye is an image search and recognition company, with expertise in computer vision, pattern recognition, neural networks, and machine learning. Users can search by image by uploading an image or dragging and dropping the image into its search field. Its technology is designed to recognize images even if they have been heavily edited and will return a list of websites in which that image appears. Instructions and browser extensions are included.
https://tineye.com/
Created by Wolfram Research, Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine, which is an online service that responds to queries by attempting to determine the answer from externally source, curated data, rather than presenting a list of documents that may contain the answer, as would most search engines. Users may also browse topical categories. A paid premium version is available for students, educators, and others. Pricing and features are posted.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/
