Alternative search engines.

Google, Yahoo, Live (but who uses that?) you all know those search engines but there are many other search engines more or less famous and maybe not that bad? With some of them you can even earn money, receive gift vouchers or give money for some good cause every time you are searching.

iRazoo is a kind of meta search engine. It displays its own search results with user comments together with search results from Yahoo and Live but apparently not from Google. If you subscribe you can win USD5.00 vouchers to use on amazon.com and each time you search you win points which you can exchange for prizes such as Mp3 players, Cameras, Memory sticks & Video Game. Vouchers can be won by anybody, points can be exchanged only if you are located in the US, the UK, Canada or India. So this second point is a negative point to use them but even worse is that they display results from Live search but not from Google. I would suggest this search engine to people living in the mentioned countries and who usually use Yahoo.

Dogpile is a meta search engine. It combines results from Google, Yahoo, Live search, Ask and other. What makes it different? They are raising money for pets in need. Their goal is to raise USD1 million until the end of 2009. I could not find where the money is coming from or how much they donate per search but I guess they will use the paid results to raise money. Indeed, they display paid results as well as organic results but they always indicate where the results are coming from. However I would NOT AVOID clicking on paid results because if someone is ready to pay for you to click on his ad it is because he believes he has what you need.

EcoKey is The World's first Eco Friendly search engine that picks up trash while you search. It is powered by Google. Eco Key is claiming that when one million people change their homepage to TheEcoKey.com, they will be able to remove roughly 900 tons of plastic and garbage from our eco-system each year, raise awareness with over 4 million people, and saving the lives of countless birds and marine animals which die needlessly each year because of a contaminated habitat. You can also enable an "Eco Filter" so that it returns eco-friendly results for the keywords you search.

Scour this one is my favorite. It is a meta search engine. It displays search results from Google, Yahoo and Live Search. It indicates the ranking of the results in each of those search engines. Your earn points every time you search, when you leave comments and when you vote for a result. Those votes are used to rank the results. You never have more than 3 pages results. I used them for quick searches and if I don't find what I want I go back to Google. You can also give them feedbacks and they even do reply to you! You start to earn money (USD25) when you reached 6 500 points. BUT this is only for people located in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, U.S., and the U.K. 6 500 points is actually a lot but you can invite friends and then you get 25% extra points of the total points of your friend. So if you are interested in this meta search engine it would be great if you could use that link to join.