Empower your searches

Let's face it, the web is a vast resource of endless databases of information and user-generated inputs and sometimes searching for something that you need is like searching for a needle in a haystack. Here are the search engines I use that I find particularly helpful when doing some internet research and I would like to share them with you.

Zuula

Zuula is a metasearch engine combining the most popular search engine platforms out there. These are Yahoo, Google and Bing, but it also incorporates search results from smaller search engines like Gigablast and Mojeek. Unlike other metasearch engines, Zuula offers the search results per search engine via tabs and you can just browse through them religiously. It also has an image search, video search and even a blog search. The filters are pretty good and searches are more organized.

Creative Commons

Sometimes I need to post pictures to go with my blog posts or a presentation and when I'm searching sometimes I wouldn't know if the images were copyrighted or not. That's why I use the Creative Commons search engine, so that I can be sure that the images that will result from my search is really available for commercial use. These results can be filtered from Flickr from users who licensed their photos with the creative commons license and from other various photo databases.

InSuggest

This is a recommendation engine which presents results based from user recommendations. They usually offer the searches with thumbnails so that you can have a sneak peek of the results. Web Insuggest is a search of all the relevant websites in relation to the keyword that you've typed into the search box. I find this very useful as well. Images Insuggest presents results mostly from Flickr. Just type in a phrase or keyword and you can easily browse through hundreds of thumbnails, the only drawback is sometimes the photos are not for commercial use. Bookmarks InSuggest crawls most of its results from Del.icio.us bookmarks.