Mainstream Search Tools

Google Groups

Google groups is a great resource for crowd sourced answers. No matter what the topic, there's an answer – and group – out there.

BoardReader

BoardReader indexes just forums, message boards and Reddit.

It can provide a wider range of results than Google Groups. Quality may be another matter.

DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo does not track or store anything about your searches. They do not profile users and show all users the same search results for a given search term. DuckDuckGo emphasizes getting information from the best sources rather than the most sources, generating its search results from key crowd-sourced sites such as Wikipedia.

Google

Google is our webmaster's preferred search web search site.

For better results, click on the the gear icon when searching and check the following settings...

SafeSearch

SafeSearch can be turned on or locked on as needed.

Results per page

We set it to 100. Scrolling down to the middle or end of the page can give you less popular, but possibly better results.

Private results

Google tracks what you search for and adjusts results based on past searches. If sharing a computer among multiple people, best to turn this Off.

Wolfram/Alpha

Wolfram|Alpha is a fundamentally different way to get knowledge and answers, processing questions rather than matching specific words.

Type in "the population of San Francisco" and it returns "825,863 people (country rank 14th) (2012 estimate)".

Also great at handling math problems. Entering "1 acre-foot per year in gallons per day" returns "892.7 gal/day (gallons per day)".

Bing

Bing is another popular search engine which many prefer.

Try a few and see which one you like.

Baidu

Baidu is the Chinese equivalent of Google.

While the site is in Chinese, it will accept English language search terms and has both text and image searches.

See the world as China sees it.

Yahoo Search

Back when the Internet was starting, Yahoo was the go-to search web site. Yahoo still maintains an independent web search engine that provides good results.