Triple Threat: 3 New Search Engines

Despite what you may think, Google and Yahoo! aren’t the only search engines in the game. We know a lot of our favorites (Lycos, RIP) fell by the wayside when Google came through and crushed the buildings, but now it seems a couple inventive companies are trying to lure surfers away from the ‘08 Mircosoft. We checked out three new ones, kgb_, Cuil and Viewzi to see what they were bringing to the game and why should think about leaving Google for them. Check out our findings below…

NAME: KGB_ [LINK]

HOW DOES IT WORK?: According to KGB_, they aren’t a search engine, they’re a knowledge engine. What’s knowledge? Well, in their words: “Knowledge is rich data combined with personal experience and sound judgment. Knowledge is data transformed into simple to find, relevant results that are easy for you to understand.” In order to provide you with more knowledge than Superhead, KGB_ offers both a search engine and a text answer service. Their web search engine uses meta-search technology to get results from the five major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Ask) and then they filter them so you only get the most relevant results. Their text messaging service lets you text them any questions you have, the more localized the better, and for $.30 they’ll hit you back with an answer.

OUR TAKE: The online searched worked well, giving us a good number of relevant search results. We would have liked a few more results, or an option to have them present more options for the 5 engines they use. With free services like Chacha, we can’t see ourselves forking over $.30 for the text message service.

NAME: Viewzi [LINK]

HOW DOES IT WORK?: In case you were getting bored with search engines that just gave you long lists of websites, Viewzi thinks they got what you need. When you enter a search term into Viewzi, it automatically tries to figure out what exactly it is you’re search for. Once it thinks it knows what it thinks it knows what you’re looking for, it presents the search results in number of different “views.” Search results are presented differently in each of the different views. For example, if you were to search for Lil’ Wayne, you can view the results (which come from a number of different engines including Google, Yahoo! and Amazon) in either the Album View which shows a bunch of his album covers, or Google Timeline View (one of our favorites) that shows Google search results in a linear, interactive timeline model. There over 15 views, some of which are more interesting and useful than others.

OUR TAKE Viewzi provided a completely different and enjoyable search experience when compared to Google and Yahoo!, but it proved a bit too much for simple searching. We like our search engines to be kind of simple and unobtrusive.

NAME: Cuil [LINK]

HOW DOES IT WORK?: Instead of giving more specialized and streamlined results like Viewzi and KGB_, Cuil boasts that they search more pages on the web than any other search engine, even Google (they claim 3x as many). Our tests showed they averages 2x as many results as Google. Pretty dope. They also claim to not rank results on popularity. Once you conduct your search, the results are presented with a short blurb underneath to further ensure you click on the right link. To the right, they have a panel called “Explore by Category” which gives you topics related to your search. Click a topic and more terms appear. Roll your mouse over one of the teams and a quick explanation of the term comes up. Our search for Barack Obama in South Carolina gave us a bunch more accurate links that Google.

OUR TAKE Their simple layout, link captions and diesel number of results, we think Cuil is a viable contender in the search game.