Are you looking for a specialized search engine to research a particular topic? Do you spend a lot of time doing research online or do you simply want to know more of the hundreds upon hundreds of search engines out there.

We present the three best sites for researching search engines or finding that one search engine that delivers exactly what you need.

Search Engine Race
Charles King is the champion of search engine diversity. His blog, AltSearchEngines , is a great place to go to keep up with news of alternative search engines.

Recently he launched a new site called The Search Race. Here you’ll find a list of what Charles Knight considers the top 100 alternative search engines at the moment. There are options to sort the list to view the top 10, top 100, or all. At the moment the list contains 146 search engines. You can also view the most recent additions and those that have the best growth rate.

If you register, you can comment on the listed search engines, vote for your favorites by clicking Pick. These favorites will then appear in a separate tab labeled My Picks.

The Search Engine List
The Search Engine List is a larger list than The Search Engine Race with some 230 search engines. Each search engine is represented by a logo, a link and a short editorial description.

The only way to sort the content is by category. The categories are accessed by pointing your mouse to an alphabetical index on top of the page. For instance, the letter M reveals the categories Maps, Medical, Meta-Search and Multi-Media.

Wikipedia
Wikipedia has a list of search engines. This list contains links without commentaries or descriptions. There are 265 search engine listings, but the number of actual search engine is lower because some search engines appear in several categories. The search engines are sorted into these categories:

• By content/topic:

• General
• Geographical limited scope
• Accountancy
• Business
• Enterprise
• Search appliances
• Job
• Legal
• Medical
• News
• People
• Real property
• Video games

• By information type: Forum, blog
  * 2.3Multimedia
  * 2.4 Source code
  * 2.5 BitTorrent
  * 2.6 Email
  * 2.7 Maps
  * 2.8 Price
  * 2.9 Question and answer

# 3 By model

* 3.1 Open source search engines
* 3.2 Social search engines
* 3.3 Metasearch engines
* 3.4 Visual search engines
* 3.5 Desktop search engines
* 3.6 Usenet

# 4 Based on

* 4.1 Google
* 4.2 Yahoo!
* 4.3 Live Search
* 4.4 Ask.com

# 5 Defunct search engines