Big List of Specialized Search Engines

Sean Pancirov
9 min readJul 9, 2019

When it comes to finding information on the World Wide Web, let’s face it, the majority of us Google everything. Those that are not using Google are more than likely using either Bing, or Yahoo! Those 3 search engines are the most widely used and, at least when it comes to basic searches, they usually get the job done.

What many people don’t realize or take into account, however, is that Google, Bing, and Yahoo! will show you only a small portion of what is actually on the web, and the results that they show you are so generalized that they may not always show you the results that you really want or need.

When performing internet searches, in order to get the type of results that you really want, often it is better to perform a more focused or specialized search. There are many lesser known search engines that are designed to search for a specific type of information. With these specialized search engines, you will get results that are focused on the type of information that you are looking for and are not diluted with a bunch of extra stuff like the results that you get from Google or Bing.

In an effort to help you make your web searches more efficient and fruitful, I have compiled a list of search engines for you, each with a specific focus to help you narrow your search results down. Many of these search engines are ones that you’ve probably never heard of before today, and you’re probably not going to remember all of these, so I recommend bookmarking this post so that you can reference it whenever you need to perform a search online. Let’s get into the list.

Acronym Finder — find out what any acronym, abbreviation, or initialism stands for.

Ad Network Directory — comprehensive list of 454 ad networks and platforms.

Any Who — find people, places, and businesses.

Blog Search Engine — search engine for finding blogs.

Board Reader — search on tons of forums and message boards all across the web.

Book Finder — Find any book at the right price.

Kindle Unlimited Membership Plans

Can I Steam It — search the web for any TV show or movie, and find out which websites are streaming it for free.

Join Prime Video Channels Free Trial

Casino Search Engine — search hundreds of online casinos with optional filters.

Click here

Cheatography — search over 3,000 cheat sheets, revisions, and quick references for just about anything you can think of.

Codase — search through over 250 million lines of web coding.

College Board — search through hundreds of college websites.

Complaint Search — search tons of complaint boards and websites to see what people are saying.

Copyright.gov — search through every registered copyright in the government’s national copyright office.

Crime Reports — search records of over 1,000 law enforcement departments by name, region, or zip code.

Directory Critic — directory of hundreds of directories.

Dropship Sites — directory full of tons of dropshipping sites.

Duck Duck Go — a search engine that doesn’t track you.

Dupli Checker — plagiarism checker.

Email Search — collection of search tools to find email addresses online.

Find Law — search engine for finding attorneys.

Find Sounds — search the web for sounds.

Find That Email — “The Yellow Pages of Email.” Find the email address of professionals from millions of companies worldwide.

Free Web Hosts — directory of hundreds of free web hosting companies.

The Freebie Directory — your searchable source of all kinds of freebies.

Grants.gov — searchable database of every government grant available.

Icon Archive — search over 700K icons.

Indeed — employment and recruitment search engine.

Kayak — search for flights, hotel rooms, and car rentals.

Find cheap flights

Cheap hotels

King Product Finder — searchable database with thousands of products.

Lexis Nexis — legal search engine.

Mag Portal — search for magazine articles in hundreds of magazines.

Manuals Lib — the ultimate manuals library with thousands of user manuals for all kinds of products.

Musgle — Google’s music search engine for finding free music.

Try Amazon Music Unlimited Free Trial

News Lookup — news search engine.

Newsletter Access — email newsletter search engine and database.

TIMJ Newsletter Sign-up

Oh My God I Love It — find interesting and current discussions, news stories and blog posts.

Paraseek — search engine for all things paranormal.

Pic Search — an image search engine with over 3 billion images indexed.

Pin Groupie — search engine for Pinterest.

Poem Hunter — search the web for poetry.

Porn MD — I’m sure that you can guess what this one is for on your own.

Public Records Center — the most updated and largest online public records and background check portal.

Radio Station World — your global radio station directory.

Reddit List — search engine for Reddit.

RX List — search engine for drugs and medications.

Search Code — search over 20 billion lines of code.

Share Digger — file search engine that searches through several popular file sharing services.

Shodan — the world’s first search engine for internet connected devices. This has been nicknamed “The Hacker’s Search Engine.”

Shopping — a search engine for shopping online.

Similar Sites — enter the URL for any website into this search engine, and it will give you a list of other websites that are most similar to the one that you entered.

Smart Bible Search — the fast Bible search engine that understands what you’re thinking.

Social Search — social media search engine for searching the social web.

Softonic — search engine for mobile and desktop apps.

Super Cook — search for recipes to make on dozens of recipe websites with ingredients you have at home.

Teddy Bear Search — search the web for teddy Bear sites.

Thomas Net — searchable database with over 500,000 industrial suppliers and over 6 million industrial products.

Tin Eye — reverse image search engine.

Threat Crowd — a search engine for threats.

Trademarkia — searchable trademark database with millions of registered trademarks.

Tube Surf — video search engine that searches several video streaming platforms such as YouTube, Myspace videos, Google videos, and several others.

Join Prime Video Channels Free Trial

Tweeple Search — search engine for Twitter.

Typo Hound — many Ebay auctions contain typos in the listing title, for example, Samsung might be spelled Samung. This means that when someone searches for Samsung, the misspelled auction is not shown, thus no bids are placed on it. Typo Hound generates common misspellings of the keywords that you enter, since few people find these auctions, you can bag incredible bargains.

USPTO — government’s searchable database of registered trademarks.

Web MD — medical information search engine.

YouTube Channels Information Database — database of YouTube influencers.

Zillow — real estate search engine.

I hope that you find this list useful. Bare in mind that there are many other search engines out there, so many in fact that there is no way I would find the time to discover and list them all, so I thought I would list some of the more useful, or interesting ones. If you know of a specialized search engine that I did not mention, and you think it should be on this list, please mention it in the comments below.

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Sean Pancirov

I am an independent writer, and publisher from Sin City, NV. I run a blog called The Internet Money Journal which covers all topics about earning money online.