Using Niche Search Engines to Find What You are Looking For?

The giant search engines serve a purpose of returning vast quantities of information.  They also come at the price of your personal information and usage data.

Niche search engines serve a different purpose.  Generally, they have a better quality of privacy protection and they help to narrow down exactly what type of information you are searching for.

List of the Top Niche Search Engines

Wolfram|Alpha

It allows you to ask a specific question and return a well-curated answer to that question without sifting through dozens of pages of results.

Hot.com

It caters to the adult industry.  The site, located at https://hot.com, also allows you to choose how much personal information you are willing to share rather than collecting it arbitrarily.

DuckDuckGo

It is a search engine that puts privacy above all.  DuckDuck Go is one of the only search engines available that does not even log your IP address so the search engine does not know how many users it has.  It cannot reveal information it does not have.  This makes DuckDuckGo a good choice for those who want the advantages of more traditional results, without sacrificing privacy.

BoardReader

It is designed to search forums and message boards.  This allows users to quickly access conversations on the web related to their particular interest.

Hotbot

It deems itself a ‘safe search’ engine.  The protection of users’ privacy is key to their success.  https://www.hotbot.com returns results based on various sources including larger search engines while hiding the request query that returned the result.  The user gets the advantage of comprehensive results while protecting their personal information.

Technorati

It is a search engine dedicated to indexing and providing links to blogs.  It has out-performed Google in returning more and better results about various blog queries.  For users looking to access the millions of blogs about tens of millions of topics, https://technorati.com is the search engine to use.

The Advantages to Niche Search Engines

• The number one advantage is time-saving. Niche search engines offer concise results within the parameters of your search. You do not have to filter and then sub-filter your results to find what you are looking for.
• Less data sharing. The search engines listed above have a superior privacy policy than most of the large engines.  You, the consumer, are in control of how and where your private information is shared.
• These search engines offer more comprehensive results. By limiting themselves to a certain type of result, you are better able to access all the relevant information regarding the topic you are searching for.
• Niche search engines make it easier to find hidden gems of information that would be buried and inaccessible with larger search engines.

There are many times and various reasons that readers don’t always want the most popular search returns.  Niche search engines have indexed more obscure sites and make them easier to access.

This is a great alternative for those who do not want the world’s most popular gardening blog.  It makes it possible to find an obscure blog written in a style you relate to that may only have fifty-seven followers.

Most humans cannot comprehend the true size of the internet. When using one of the search engine giants, their algorithms have an inherent bias to popular information.

This bias means you get hundreds of results that are less specific, but more popular, for your query.  The algorithms for niche engines are more focused on returning exact results that are specific to your query.  Hence, the quality and specificity of the information improve when using the more specialized search engines.