If you’re one of those people who likes to sit in their room all day wearing a tin foil hat, or if you’re just totally fed up with Google invading every aspect of your life, you’ll be glad to know that in most cases, there’s a decent alternative to just about every Google product known to man.

But today we’re going to keep things simple, and that means focusing on where Google’s evil empire first began… Where else but with “search”, an action that has become so synonymous with the web’s #1 company that we don’t even bother to “search” for anything at all – rather, we “Google” things instead.

Google’s stranglehold on web search is about as tight as it’s possible to be in most countries to be sure, but despite its overwhelming dominance, that fact hasn’t deterred a few startups from trying to take a small piece of its market. We’ve previously covered DuckDuckGo, the private search engine that the NSA just can’t track, which has almost doubled its user base in the wake of the Ed Snowden leaks, but could there be room for even more search competition? SiliconANGLE recently stumbled upon a few interesting new startups that believe there is…

Leap2

The makers of Leap 2 have already made a point of claiming that they don’t intend to replace Google Search, because, as they put it, “Google is really, really good at what Google does. They are good at PageRank and pulling up relevant articles.”

Instead, Leap2 is trying an altogether different tactic, offering a different kind of search experience for a special kind of user – the younger generation – that have not been using Google Search from the get-go.

So what makes Leap2 different?  Two things really; first, it incorporates search results from public tweets; and second, it’s far more image-centric, because admit it or not, images often speak much louder (and are a lot nicer to look at) than words.

Leap2 is available on the web, the Apple App Store and on Google Play.

It’s easy to use, just like Google Search.  You type in your query in the search bar at top of the page – say “Cory Monteith”, the actor who just passed away in his hotel room – our sympathies go out to the family, friends and fans – and you’re presented with a bunch of interesting snippets, including social media results, articles, news, official sites and photos, which bring up even more information when you hover over them.

Even better is that Leap2 gets more specific: There are five tabs, including Images, Web, Local, Social, News, which you can click on to get more particular results of “Monteith”, depending on exactly what you’re looking for. A bit like Blekko perhaps, only it looks nicer :)

On the right side of the search bar, there’s a crosshair icon which allows you to narrow down your search query by location, either for results near your current location or to a specific location which you can enter.

Because of the social results integration, it’s quite easy to know what people are saying about the queries you type in, it’s like an all in one search place for everything you need. On the downside though, it’s fair to say that Leap2 lacks any real depth, and seems to only produce ten or so results, no matter what you’re searching for.

Disclaimer: Leap2 collects information from users when people visit or register on their site, subscribe to their newsletter, respond to a survey, fill out a form or download the app.  The information collected is used to personalize user experience, improve website or product, improve customer service, process transactions, to administer a contest, promotion, survey or other site feature, and send periodic emails.  It uses cookies, share some user information to third parties in some instances, but sensitive information is “ transmitted via Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology and then encrypted into our database to be only accessed by those authorized with special access rights to our systems, and are required to keep the information confidential. After a transaction, your private information (credit cards, social security numbers, financials, etc.) will not be kept on file for more than 60 days”

Blippex

The second find of the day is Blippex. Dubbed as the “Search engine for the people, by the People,” this startup search engine is attempting to redefine your search experience by developing an entirely new method of gauging a site’s importance and relevance. This new metric of ranking pages is called DwellRank, and essentially what it’s trying to do is list its results based on how long users spend time on pages, the idea being that the longer the average person spends on a site, the better (or more informative) that page must be, hence it gets ranked higher.

Blippex has built extensions for all major browsers, which means that it can track the URL of each web page its users visit, and consequently track how much time they spent on that page. Just like any search engine, all you have to do is enter your query on the search bar.  A search for “SiliconANGLE” for example, throws up some of the most popular articles from this lovely website, together with a selection of other sites that have mentioned SiliconANGLE at one time or other (and presumably received a lot of attention for doing so – thanks!).

There does seem to be one drawback with Blippex that needs to be ironed out. From our tests, it seems that many of the articles listed are quite long, so we can’t help but wonder if that might be at least part of the reason why people spent longer reading those pages – though we can assure you the SiliconANGLE articles are all fantastic, of course :)

The other downside is that Blippex doesn’t offer a lot more besides basic search at present – no video search, no news, no images, just good ol’ regular search and that’s your lot! Even so, it looks like a nice idea and may well be one site that’s worth keeping an eye on.

Available on the web and Google Play.

Disclaimer: By using the Blippex extension, it saves three data points: the URL, the current time, and the time you spent on each page. It’s disclaimer adds that they “do not save anything which could possibly identify you.”  It does not deny that it tracks its users as it believes that it is needed to improve the service, they do however believe that people should be made aware that they are being tracked.

Enginuity

This particular search engine ranks search results based on social shares.  So rather than use any kind of algorithm or ranking system of its own, it simply delivers its top results based on how many people share the link through sites like Facebook or Twitter.

“We’re very picky on what we share, so I think that really counts,” Daniel Gardiner’s said in an interview. “It shows someone really valued that information versus something that’s gotten no shares at all.”

We should point out that Enginuity is not a “proper” search engine in the way that Google, Bing or Yandex is. You can’t just go to its search page and start searching – instead, Enginuity is a free app available for download in the Chrome Web Store which entails that users sign up for the service before they can use it.

There are three options: “Love for Nothings,” which is a free account that features web, reviews, news search, thumbnail content preview, social media sharing, content opinion rating, email support, and social dashboard integration; “Greatness,” which costs $10.99 a month and features the same thing as the the free version plus viral search and social commentary rating; and finally “Team Greatness,” which features everything on the Greatness subscription plus 100 percent content searching for groups and teams, secure search results, consolidated billing, and Tier 1 Enterprise Support.

Same as the others, just type your query on the search bar after creating your account.  It delivers only those results that have proven to be popular on social sites, and allows you to directly share these links using your own social accounts right there on the results page.

Disclaimer: Uses cookies to monitor browsing preferences, collects name and job title, contact information including email address, demographic information such as postcode, preferences and interests, other information relevant to customer surveys and/or offers which will be used for internal record keeping, to improve our products and services, periodically send promotional emails about new products, special offers or other information which we think you may find interesting using the email address which you have provided, or to contact users for market research purposes.

Okay, so the above search engines might be just as bad as Google in some ways – they all collect user information, but even so they’re all quite interesting to use, each offering a different kind of search experience that should appeal to a certain breed of searcher. Give them a try and let us know what you think ;)