Alternative Search Engines: Some of the Best Speciality Search Engines [April 2013]

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Gone are the early days of the Web where we had only a handful of search engines to point us to data that we otherwise wouldn't have encountered. Not immediately, at any rate. We are all conversant with the Googles, Yahoos and Bings of the world. What about some other nice, speciality search engines that don't offer you the regular jazz? Why try and enlarge the scope of a search engine below....

❶ Answer Engine: Quora

Quora is a community-based search engine that focuses on users answering questions on topics that they are self-professed experts on. Users have the ability to vote up or voter down any answer to any question. A democratic process thereby ensures that the best set of answers are visible at the top of the page while low-quality replies are relegated to the bottom. This site is much better than Yahoo Answers,and definitely worth checking out.
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❷ Stats Overload: Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha calls itself more thn a search engine, providing "access to the world's facts and data and calculating answers across a range of topics."  And it does that pretty well. Wolfram Alpha is a great tool for mining stats and data sets, packaging them nicely in an easy-to-understand format and making you much wiser. If you find the whole thing too daunting in the beginning, just visit http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples to wrap your head around how Wolfram Alpha functions.
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❸ Private browsing:  Duck Duck Go / Ixquick

If you're paranoid about leaving an online trail, be warned that search engines do track what websites you visit. However, if you want to keep your online search quests undetected, try checking out Ixquick.com or duckduckgo.com - two search engines that promise to not track user activity. Based on the search query, Ixquick returns search results from other popular search engines - Duck Duck Go also works on similar model. Not only does Ixquick not record IP addresses of incoming visitors , it also doesn't  share your personal info into advertisers.
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❹ Social Search: Topsy
This search engine searches contents published on Twitter and the Web, sorted by relevance or date. Topsy specializes in providing search results  for trending topics on social networking websites, pointing to expert websites and social accounts for a topic, and even scouring through Twitter to hunt what you seek.

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❺ Academia: 
Often while searching for information, we forget to access the treasure trove of knowledge assimilated and distributed by famous universities from around the world. visit Cornell University's http://arxiv.org for everything on Advanced Sciences; or the Universit of Southamptoms's http://cogprints.org for miniung information on topics related to General Science. Don' Miss visiting http://medlineplus.gov, the U.S. National Institutes of Health's website on public empowerment.

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