It is no secret that you can search the net and find almost anything you want. A quest that is becoming quite popular is searching for love, with thousands and thousands of people joining online dating sites every day. However, do you know that there are many ways to search for “love” on the net?
Before you stop reading and click somewhere else thinking that this is another self-help cheesy article about finding the perfect partner, you should know that this is actually an article about finding your perfect search engine.
According to the latest figures released by Hitwise, in Australia, 88.14% of online searches are made using Google, 6.12% using MSN Search and 4.02% using Yahoo Search. In other words, only a small portion of internet users (less than 2%) utilise the other 43 search engines listed in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool, and they are probably not aware of the many more available on the internet.
The range of search engines that you can use is large and steadily growing. There are search engines for almost every topic imaginable from health to legal terms, to books, cartoons, sound effects and many more. Here we will test some of these alternative search engines by searching for “love” (the word) in all of them.
Searching everywhere
When you look for “love” on a search engine like Google or MSN Search, the results you obtain are all from that specific search engine. However, there are times when you would like to expand your search and access other places. In those cases, you may want to use a metasearch, a search engine that allows you to simultaneously look for information in multiple search engines.
In Google your search for “love” can first take you to the meaning of love according to Wikipedia, followed by a link to the “Love Calculator”. Using metasearches such as Dogpile, Mamma, Excite, Ixquick or Zuula allows you to expand your results to include links to love spells and online dating websites, links that you may have not found if you were solely using Google.
Love by groups
Finding your way through the 2,270,000,000 results that Google offers you for the word love is not an easy task, especially when those results are not grouped around a specific theme. If you think your search for love will be easier if the results were categorised for you, then you should try clustering search engines such as Clusty, Gigablast and iBoogie. They will give you all the results grouped by themes such as “love poems”, “dating”, “love quotes” and “romantic love”, making the process of choosing the right one for you much quicker and easier.
Let’s click
If you are one of those people who prefer to click rather than scroll, then visual search engines such as Kartoo and Quintura may be perfect for you. Instead of presenting the results in a one-dimensional format (list), these search engines show the result in a two-dimensional map.
The visual map shows those words and word combinations that are most closely connected with your search query. For instance when you search for “love”, you get keywords (themes) such as “dating“, “romance”, “singles” and “advice”. When you click on one of those words (i.e. romance) you narrow your search, in turn getting new results such as “passion”, “sex” and “free”, each of them with links to relevant websites.
Visual search engines are also great when searching for images. A good one -if you are not in a rush- is TagGalaxy. Search for love and you will get tags like “kiss”, “couple”, “hearts”, then finding the lovely image you are looking for is only a few clicks away.
Show me love
Nowadays, when we all want to see things instead of just reading about them, searching for multimedia files has become quite popular. Proof of this is the Hitwise figures, which show YouTube as the third most searched for term in Australia in July 2008.
However, the popularity of YouTube means that people do not use other multimedia search engines. In other words, they are missing out, as their query only searches for files on the YouTube domain, instead of using multimedia search engines that look for files in other multimedia sites, blogs and the World Wide Web in general.
For instance, if you search for love in YouTube you will easily find a love song video that you can dedicate to your special one. However, if you make the same search in multimedia metasearches such as Blinkx, PureVideo and Pixsy, you will also learn how to heal a broken heart through love spells, get videos of the latest love related news (celebrity weddings and divorces), see thrillers of the latest Hollywood love comedies and many more.
Talk to me
If you are starting to feel that no one talks to you anymore and you are getting lonely but you can’t stop searching the net, then Ms Dewey search engine may be the solution to all your problems. This femme fatale search engine has a good-looking woman who talks to you while you search. She will even make comments about your query, and remind you she is there if you appear inactive for a while.
If you are not one to fall for Ms Dewey’s demeanour, but you still want a talking search engine, then you may want to try AskVox. Vox may not be as interactive as Ms Dewey but you will still get the feeling that someone is actually answering your questions.
Until death do us part?
As you can see, there is no reason for you to keep using the same search engine all the time. No matter if you are looking for love or something else, there are many options out there that you can use to get the results you want, in a faster and easier manner.
New search engines are constantly emerging and you will find websites such as AltSearchEngines that will keep you up-to-date with the latest developments. So go ahead, cheat on your current search engine and find love elsewhere.