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Home » Library » Features » Top 25 Niche Search Engines for Students
Top 25 Niche Search Engines for Students
At OEDb, we love our specialty and niche search engines. And so do college students. Recently, our interest in the variety of search engines available on the Web begged the question: which niche search engines have the biggest reach? With nowhere to turn to answer this question definitively, we thought it would be an interesting exercise to rank all of the biggest niche search engines.
In ranking the top niche search engines, our goal was to show — using objective data from reliable sources — which sites are the most popular, according to visitor traffic and site backlinks. To this end, we used data for these four metrics to calculate the rankings:
Top 25 (see complete methodology below)
| Rank | Site |  |
 |
 |
 |
Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | FreeFind | 9 | 10 | 9 | 10 | 38 |
| 2 | Dogpile | 8 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 38 |
| 3 | MetaCrawler | 8 | 8 | 10 | 8 | 34 |
| 4 | WebCrawler | 8 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 35 |
| 5 | Mamma Metasearch | 7 | 10 | 6 | 10 | 33 |
| 6 | Lyrics Search Engine | 5 | 9 | 8 | 9 | 31 |
| 7 | Creative Commons Search | 8 | 9 | 5 | 9 | 31 |
| 8 | Clusty | 7 | 8 | 10 | 7 | 32 |
| 9 | HotBot | 8 | 8 | 8 | 8 | 32 |
| 10 | Koders | 7 | 7 | 7 | 6 | 27 |
| 11 | Web Wombat | 6 | 7 | 5 | 8 | 26 |
| 12 | Vivisimo | 8 | 6 | 6 | 7 | 27 |
| 13 | sensis.com.au | 6 | 5 | 7 | 6 | 24 |
| 14 | KartOO | 7 | 5 | 8 | 5 | 25 |
| 15 | Scirus | 8 | 6 | 6 | 4 | 24 |
| 16 | Blog Search Engine | 7 | 4 | 9 | 5 | 25 |
| 17 | AardvarkTravel.net | 5 | 5 | 7 | 4 | 21 |
| 18 | Pandia Powersearch | 6 | 6 | 2 | 6 | 20 |
| 19 | Juju | 6 | 3 | 4 | 7 | 20 |
| 20 | Ananzi South Africa | 6 | 7 | 3 | 3 | 19 |
| 21 | Chemical Search Engine | 7 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 19 |
| 22 | Khoj | 6 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 17 |
| 23 | Ask an Aardvark | 6 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 16 |
| 24 | SurfGopher | 5 | 3 | 5 | 2 | 15 |
| 25 | Beaucoup! | 6 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 15 |
Methodology
To begin, we found a set of Web sites that met a certain criteria. To become a member of the set of Web sites to be ranked, a Web site must, as of August 14, 2007:
- be listed on the Wikipedia page List of search engines; or
- be listed in the top 200 results on a Google search for search engines ; and
- be primarily a niche search engine, not Google, Yahoo!, MSN, or any other large search engine.
For each metric, a score was assigned on a 0–10 scale. For Google PageRank, raw PageRank data was scored. For Alexa Rank, Technorati Link Count, and Compete People Count, the Web sites were broken up into deciles. If a Web site was in the 0>10% decile, a 1 was scored; for the 10>20% decile, a 2 was scored; and so on, up to a 10 being scored for the 90–100% decile. If no data was available, a 0 was scored.
The overall score for each Web site is the sum of the scores of the four metrics. In the event of a tie in overall score, the tie is broken according to the Alexa Rank raw data.
Raw Data for Entire Set
| Rank | Site | |
|
|
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | FreeFind | 9 | 3,012 | 4,438 | 1,569,920 |
| 2 | Dogpile | 8 | 2,089 | 8,650 | 3,546,327 |
| 3 | MetaCrawler | 8 | 12,204 | 6,391 | 212,471 |
| 4 | WebCrawler | 8 | 9,880 | 3,405 | 935,465 |
| 5 | Mamma Metasearch | 7 | 2,643 | 1,753 | 1,951,013 |
| 6 | Lyrics Search Engine | 5 | 7,805 | 3,056 | 1,052,727 |
| 7 | Creative Commons Search | 8 | 5,438 | 956 | 253,458 |
| 8 | Clusty | 7 | 16,428 | 5,142 | 70,952 |
| 9 | HotBot | 8 | 20,019 | 2,579 | 188,014 |
| 10 | Koders | 7 | 21,142 | 2,134 | 31,295 |
| 11 | Web Wombat | 6 | 24,944 | 1,125 | 137,902 |
| 12 | Vivisimo | 8 | 37,949 | 1,479 | 45,116 |
| 13 | sensis.com.au | 6 | 41,546 | 1,930 | 45,007 |
| 14 | KartOO | 7 | 62,678 | 2,409 | 20,171 |
| 15 | Scirus | 8 | 36,096 | 1,130 | 8,290 |
| 16 | Blog Search Engine | 7 | 68,920 | 3,469 | 13,157 |
| 17 | AardvarkTravel.net | 5 | 44,873 | 2,150 | 6,876 |
| 18 | Pandia Powersearch | 6 | 39,264 | 54 | 37,229 |
| 19 | Juju | 6 | 131,487 | 255 | 99,139 |
| 20 | Ananzi South Africa | 6 | 26,030 | 159 | 5,398 |
| 21 | Chemical Search Engine | 7 | 112,914 | 192 | 9,985 |
| 22 | Khoj | 6 | 93,731 | 266 | 4,337 |
| 23 | Ask an Aardvark | 6 | 67,362 | 67 | 3,339 |
| 24 | SurfGopher | 5 | 232,510 | 349 | 2,565 |
| 25 | Beaucoup! | 6 | 577,334 | 87 | 7,124 |
| 26 | Economics Search Engine | 6 | 884,714 | 12 | 1,333 |
| 27 | South African Search Engine | 5 | 672,916 | 17 | 0 |
| 28 | The Cybercafe Search Engine | 6 | 1,344,105 | 40 | 0 |
| 29 | TSEP | 5 | 468,327 | 14 | 0 |
| 30 | Worldwide Composites Search Engine | 6 | 1,920,095 | 4 | 0 |
