When Not to Google: Searches You’re Better Off Making Elsewhere

 Kevin Purdy — For the searching you do every day, go ahead and use the powerful, convenient, ever-improving Google. But for certain queries, other search engines are significantly better. Let's dig into the searches you're better off making at engines other than Google.

Google's good at a lot of things, but it also has to serve a lot of interests. Any relatively modern search engine knows that, in order to compete and differentiate, it has to do something different, something better, or something special, aside from general "katy perry video" searches. Here are the best search engines for tackling specific types of search:

DuckDuckGo: Quick Site Searches, Programming, and Totally Anonymous Searching

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Startup search engine DuckDuckGo (DDG for short) spells it out, right on their front page: "We don't track you!" And they're serious about that. Their privacy policy is an explainer and affirmation of user rights, written in plain English. The privacy settings allow you to get granular about what other sites see when you arrive from DDG, and if you're using the TOR network for proxy privacy, DuckDuckGo is running its own helper server to provide total search security, end to end.

That's nice, but what does DuckDuckGo do? It "bangs." Bang, as in the term programmers use to refer to exclamation marks. By putting an exclamation in front of a site or resource you want to search, you can quickly search on that site from DuckDuckGo, whether you know how that search works or not. Searching !lifehacker linux uses our own site's search engine to look up Linux posts (though you can shorten it to !lh, too). !amazon or !atriggers a product search on Amazon.com, and !yt a YouTube search. But you can loosely shoot from the hip and hit an astounding number of sites: !economist, !weather Boulder, !retailmenot green mountain coffee, and so on. With DuckDuckGo installed as a quick search option in your browser, it's much easier to search a site this way than to type out site:economist.com libya and hunt through results.

There are lots of neat "bangs" to dig through, but take special note, programmers and general nerd practitioners: there are a lot of computer and code resources here. !python,!wpplugins, !github—the list goes on. In fact, DDG even includes the other search engines we've referenced here in its bangs. If you really were looking for a new default search engine, we could see DuckDuckGo as a viable option—if only for the sincere convenience of, say, searching the Android Market with !market angry birds.

Blekko: Cruft-Free Results and Very Specific Things

Even after make a pretty big change to filter "content farms,", searching Google for anything that might be remotely popular, especially in the form of a how-to or question, continues to involve sorting through varying versions of on-demand writing. Some of it is decent, even helpful; much of it looks the same, though, and you often find yourself wishing for more authoritative voice.

Enter Blekko. On its own, Blekko narrows down your search terms and filters out a lot of the ad-filled results you might come across. Search on a "hot" topic, like travel, product reviews, or song lyrics, and Blekko automatically filters out sites that seem to exist mostly to capture traffic without providing too much new information. Search in the health field, and the results are narrowed down to a set of about 75 sites that Blekko's editors trust.