Five slick search engines you should know about

Google, Yahoo and Bing get the press but Exalead, Scour, Hunch , Scirus and Indeed fill a void

With Microsoft's recent addition of Bing to the search landscape, the spotlight is again shining on who has the best engine for finding anything and everything on the Internet. The debate over who has the best search likely will go on into eternity with a focus on the big three: Google,Yahoo and Microsoft.  But there are countless other search engines out there focused on zeroing users in on the data they want or need. Here is a look at five that are offering some slick service.

The University of California Berkeley Library recommends a second opinion when searching the Internet, and Exalead is one of its top recommendations.

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With Microsoft's recent addition of Bing to the search landscape, the spotlight is again shining on who has the best engine for finding anything and everything on the Internet. The debate over who has the best search likely will go on into eternity with a focus on the big three: Google,Yahoo and Microsoft.  But there are countless other search engines out there focused on zeroing users in on the data they want or need. Here is a look at five that are offering some slick service.

Exalead

The University of California Berkeley Library recommends a second opinion when searching the Internet, and Exalead is one of its top recommendations.

The search engine features a number of advanced options including phonetic search for those who are sometimes spelling challenged. Spell a word like it sounds and results will include words that sound like what was typed into the search field.
There is also a proximity search feature with a "Near" operator that finds documents where the query terms are within 16 words of each other, and a "Next" operator where search terms are next to each other. Other options include searching in a specific language only, after or before a certain date, and a prefix search that looks for the beginning letters of a word.
In the results, users see thumbnail pictures of Web pages, which can be pulled up and previewed without leaving the site.
In addition, Exalead has enterprise search products available (desktop, network). Its Cloudview platform support 300 formats, including structured data (RDBMS, ERP, Lotus Notes, directories) and unstructured content (e-mail messages, PDFs, Office documents, Web pages).

Scour

Social networking meets social searching. Users can offer feedback on results of their search queries, which are tabulated from across the three top search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing). The feedback moves individual results either up or down in the rankings, which is designed to make the results more relevant as time goes on. Users also can create custom algorithm, which lets them determine how results will be ranked.

Users can gain as many as three points per search (one each for searching, voting, commenting), and earn a $25 Visa gift card for each 6,500 points they collect. Users also earn 25% of the points earned by users they refer to the Scour.
Scour is developing search widgets for Windows and Mac desktops, and a Yahoo search widget.

Hunch

Hunch is all about a decision engine, asking the user 10 questions or less to arrive at a solution to a problem or concern. At the core of the search site is a question selection algorithm built by Hunch's small collection of Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientists with backgrounds in machine learning.

The design is such that questions are asked just like a human would structure a line of questioning. The questions asked vary based on what has already been asked and how it was answered.

And Hunch is another search engine with a social aspect. The smarts are a collection of common knowledge derived from users who can submit new topics, questions to ask and decision outcomes.