Search is so much more than “the big 3″ (Google, Yahoo and Live). Charles Knight at AltSearchEngines publishes a very interesting monthly list of 100 top alternative search engines. Now he has nominated 10 search engines for the Search Engine of the Year Award.

AltSearchEngines is a blog about — you guessed it — alternative search engines. The goal is to be the definitive destination for everything related to alternative search engines — over 1,000 of them. You won’t find in-depth info on all 1000 yet, but the blog is still quite young.

On December 3 AltSearchEngines will announce the alternative search engine of the year. Read on for a presentation of the nominees.

AfterVote calls itself a social search engine. It is a metasearch engine that presents results from Google, Yahoo and Live and shows you how each site ranks in these search engines as well as the Google PageRank and Alexa rank. The social aspect is that registered users can “vote up” a site among the result and post comments. These comments become visible in the search results. They will have to have a lot of active users before the social aspect gets really useful, though.

Answers.com is a free one-stop shop with information on over 4 million topics. The results are not lists of links, but excerpts of articles from e.g. Wikipedia, Oxford University press and other reference publishers. Even though the site has too many ads in our opinion, it’s a great source of information with lots of useful features.

Dialogus claims to be a new generation search engine that automatically finds answers to your questions. Unfortunately, none of our searches (gallileo, apollo 13, shakespeare) returned answers, although one them returned some info in Russian.

Exalead is a French search engine which, among other features has Wikipedia search, blog and forum search and an image finder. We like it.

GoshMe is still in Beta and you have to register to test it. When ready, GoshMe will be a way to discover and utilize the web’s countless search engines. An alternative search engine to find alternative search engines.

KartOO is a metasearch engine that displays the results not as the ubiquitous list, but as a map or cloud where each result is represented by their URL and a thumbnail of the site. The cloud also contains keywords that show how the sites are related. It’s a little slow on my computer and the map takes some getting used to.

KoolTorch clusters search results. It then applies a taxonomy overlay which takes traditional search engine results and displays them in a graphic user interface that uses circles in different colors, each representing one cluster. It certainly looks different, but we find it difficult to use.

Omgili is a search engine designed to index web-based discussion forums. Using Omgili, you can avoid posting already asked questions and quickly find your answer. With Omgili’s advanced search capabilities you can choose to independently search titles, topics or just the replies of a discussion. A great way to mine the information in discussion forums.

Onkosh is a search portal for the Arabic web. It not only searches web pages in Arabic, but also web pages in English and French with Arabic related information. Onkosh understands the Arabic language and utilizes advanced natural language processing techniques. A useful service in our globalized days.

Quintura is a search engine based on a visual search engine technology and makes use of Yahoo’s index. The visual part is this: When you do a search on Quintura, your search term appears at the center of a cloud — not unlike a tag cloud, but consisting of related search terms, not tags. These related search terms help you narrow your query. It works quite nicely and we like it.

You can vote for your favorite alternative search engine of the year by leaving a comment after the blog post. Don’t forget to describe why you like one of the Top 10 and remember that the the selection of search engine of the year will rely on many sources, not just this survey.

Read Pandia’s review of Alt Search Engines.
Top 5 alternative search engines from Pandia