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Updated: 1/28/2025
As we have seen over the last few years, all mainstream search engines have become worthless.
Google
Bing
Yahoo
DuckDuckGo
They censor, manipulate, and hide search results. To circumvent this evil, I’ve compiled a list to share some of the different engines I use in my research. While I haven’t tested all, I’ve used many of the ones listed below. As I come across new sources of knowledge, I’ll update the list accordingly.
To help make the list easier to view, I've broken it down into sections:
Alternative Internet Search: Mainstream replacements.
BigPharma Related: Payments to Doctors from BigPharma, Documents, and other medical-related issues.
Research Search Sites: Research papers, journals, and academic information.
Archive Searches: The archive searches for pages that go missing.
Organizations & People Search: Connections, political figures and networks.
Internet Searches
BoardReader: searches community boards
Brave Search: a private search engine.
Disconnect: a non-tracking search engine.
Freespoke: an uncensored search engine.
Mojeek: a growing independent search engine that does not track you.
Presearch: a Decentralized Search Engine. Search privately and receive better results.
Search Encrypt: a privacy-based search engine.
Searx: a free internet metasearch engine aggregating results from more than 70 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled.
StartPage: search the web without tracking, profiling, or a search history.
Swisscows: an anonymous search engine.
wiby.me: classic internet search engine.
Yandex: I haven't tested, but reader approved.
BigPharma Related
Dollars for Docs: How Industry Dollars Reached Your Doctors. The last update was October 17, 2019.
Open Payments: The Open Payments Search Tool searches payments made by drug and medical device companies to physicians, physician assistants, advanced practice nurses, and teaching hospitals. Data displayed on the Open Payments Search Tool is from January 2015 through December 2023
PubChem, National Library of Medicine: Quickly find chemical information from authoritative sources
Research Search Sites
Base Search: one of the most powerful search engines for academic research texts. More than 100 million scientific articles, 70% of which are free.
Bioline International: a not-for-profit scholarly publishing cooperative committed to providing open access to quality research journals published in developing countries.
PDF Drive:the largest website for free download of PDF books. Claim more than 225 million titles.(until further notice, I removed this search as a reader mentioned it’s filled with spam.)RefSeek is a web search engine for students and researchers that aims to make academic information accessible to everyone. RefSeek searches over five billion documents, including web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals, and newspapers.
RePEc, Research Papers in Economics: a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in 102 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in Economics and related sciences. The heart of the project is a decentralized bibliographic database of working papers, journal articles, books, book chapters, and software components, all maintained by volunteers. The collected data are then used in various services that serve or enhance the collected metadata to users.
Science.gov: searches over 60 databases and over 2,200 scientific websites to provide users access to more than 200 million pages of authoritative federal science information, including research and development results.
Springer Link: providing researchers access to millions of scientific documents from journals, books, series, protocols, reference works, and proceedings.
statista Everything you need to know about data and users. Check them out.
WorldCat: search the content of 20,000 global libraries.
Archive Searches
Archived Web, search the web cache to view archived pages of any website.
Archive.today is a time capsule for web pages.
Internet Archive Wayback Machine, Explore over 734 billion web pages saved over time.
UK Web Archive (UKWA) collects millions of websites annually, preserving them for future generations. Use this site to discover old or obsolete versions of UK websites, search the text of the websites, and browse websites curated on different topics and themes.
Organizations & People Search
Coronavirus funding per state (they removed it, here’s the link via internet archive)
Discover the Networks, An Online Database of the Left and its Agendas.
GlobalResearch, the center for research on Globalization.
GTD — Global Terrorism Database, is an open-source database including information on terrorist events around the world from 1970 through 2020.
OnTheIssues, every political leader on every issue.
OpenGovWA, Open government data in Washington State
OpenCorporates, Access legal-entity records collected directly from official sources across 140+ jurisdictions.
Open Secrets, Nonpartisan, independent and nonprofit, OpenSecrets is the nation's premier research group tracking money in U.S. politics and its effect on elections and public policy.
I moved away from using Google search some years ago. Since then i have used startpage, qwant and presearch. They didn't get me what i was looking for in most cases. I have settled on yandex for now and use brave (browser) search as well.
It's a big problem. Nothing really works as well as Google did back in the early years, but now that's corrupted and i refuse to give them any additional traffic by using their search, by and large. On occasion Google still does give me better results than start, presearch and qwant, but Google is the absolute last resort.
Great resources, thanks for posting!