Oldavista is a search engine that retrieves results from the “internet of yesterday,” sourcing from archived personal web pages such as GeoCities, AOL Hometown, Angelfire, and others. It’s modeled after the now-defunct AltaVista and scraped from the Internet Archive. I love the nostalgia exploration! — CD

Reddit is often a more reliable source of information than Google, especially for product reviews, restaurant recommendations, and how-to instructions. Unfortunately, Reddit’s native search engine is clunky and leaves a lot to be desired. I started using Giga, a site that returns relevant Reddit posts and summarizes them. I used it to find out how to cook chicken breasts so they don’t become tough and dry. — MF

I didn’t know it, but I guess I did need another search engine for restaurants. Map of the Best filters only “the best” restaurants near you based on stars, awards and reviews. It eliminates a lot of the Yelp noise and is especially helpful for me in San Jose, California where there’s an abundance of Mexican restaurants serving delicious food. — CD 

Google has taken its first steps toward integrating its generative AI into your search. Google SGE is now available as a default option in your browser. When you google something the AI sorts the answers into a readable summary, which allows you to respond and ask further questions in a conversational mode. It displays at the very top of the search page in a tinted box. I find it very helpful, reliable, and extremely easy to use – it’s just there. To turn it on, you need a Google account, Chrome on desktop or Google app on phone, and to be in the US. — KK

Reddit's search function is not pleasant to navigate, so whenever I discover a better search engine for it, I always get excited to share it widely. GigaBrain is the newest and best search engine for finding product recommendations and experience-based answers from actual people. Whatever your question is, GigaBrain will extract from billions of Reddit comments and provide you with summarized results. — CD

I felt a sense of glee when I came across Emojiton, because I take every opportunity to use emojis when it's appropriate. I'm a fan mostly because they add a playful emotional context to whatever I'm trying to convey. Emojiton is perfect for finding a string of emojis to translate films or books, or words in other languages. Here's Pinocchio in emojis. — CD

As an alternative to Google I've been asking Perplexity.ai all my questions, because it provides more than just a list of results. It searches a wide range of sources, including academic papers, and writes up a quick summary with cited sources I can click on for further research. It also guesses my follow-up questions. It feels more like a conversation than just search results. — CD

Swurl.com is a web search engine that is optimally designed for mobile. It instantly searches Google, LinkedIn, Instagram, Amazon, YouTube, Images, News and Reddit, and all results are viewed by scrolling or swiping — no clicking. Definite timesaver. — CD

Google has famously not added anything to its simple and austere search page in 20 years. But recently they added something special: a little camera icon. This is Google Lens. You can drag an image into the Google’s search bar and use AI to do many more things that Google Image does. If it is a common image it can tell you the source of the image. If it is an uncommon image it can show you similar images. If it is a product, it can identify it and suggest sources. If it is a plant or living creature it can identify it. It can translate foreign scripts, including mathematics. If I am searching for something that has an image associated with it, I can often find much better results, faster, searching via the image in Google Lens. — KK

Consensus.app is a search engine that extracts, aggregates and distills findings from 200 million peer-reviewed scientific research papers to answer your questions. It’s still in beta, so there is disclaimer that the results are not meant to be taken as final truth, but more of a reflection of relevant research relating to your query. I love using other search engines besides Google whenever I can. Here’s a list of other interesting search engines we’ve recommended in the past. — CD

A while back I recommended Listen Notes as a podcast search engine, but unfortunately the advance search features are now behind a paywall. Recomendo reader Ken Rogan suggested Podchaser.com as an alternative and I’ve been using it for the past couple months to find episodes on specific subjects or keywords for free and without registering. — CD

AnswerThePublic takes all the autocomplete data from search engines to report back what questions people are asking all over the world. You can test out the the search engine with 1-2 keywords, which is helpful for anyone doing market research or just nosy like me. You can use it twice a day for free without having to pay a monthly cost. — CD

Oldestsearch.com reverse-orders all Google search results so that you see the oldest webpages first. This is refreshing to use, because I so often feel like all the top results are repetitive. — CD

I never had any success searching Reddit directly, so I use Google and append all my queries with site:reddit.com. Redditle.com is exactly that — only a simpler, more direct way to search Reddit. You can even search within a specific subreddit. This would work well with Mark’s previous recommendation on Finding the best products online. — CD

Clive Thompson created this search tool for weird old books in an attempt to rewild our attention. It only finds books one at a time and in the public domain, which you can download. I found this 1901 copy of Studies of Trees in Winter, which is actually a book I came across in a Berkeley library years ago and have been searching for. I also discovered this — definitely weird — rare manuscript titled The Complex Vision by poet/philosopher John Cowper Powys. I love tools like these that help me break free from the same old internet loop. — CD

I love the serendipitous search results I get when using Marginalia. It is not equipped to answer questions and suggests that you “instead try to imagine some text that might appear in the website you are looking for, and search for that.” SEO-optimized sites are down-ranked and text-heavy sites are favored. If there is a concept or subject I am curious about this search engine will redirect me to blog posts and old personal websites — all of which are never disappointing and always interesting. It’s given me such a larger window to the internet and I hope it never goes away. — CD

Flim is a new AI search engine that will search inside of movies, kind of. So if I am looking for all the scenes in any movie where someone is wearing a pirate hat, I can in theory find all the instances of that. In practice Flim will return many of them but many other hat scenes, too. Or I might want to find all scenes in movies with gold bars. Flim can find the gold, but not all bars. Right now, the beta version of Flim search is far from perfect, but way better than nothing if you want to search deep inside movie scenes by keywords. — KK