You search much more specifically with these alternative search engines.

Some users use more than one search engine. For example, they try Google first and if they can’t find what they’re looking for there, they also contact a search engine like Bing. So-called metasearch engines or search aggregators do this themselves. They automatically forward your search term to multiple search engines, then retrieve the results to present them cleanly in the search results list.

Dogpile is an English-speaking meta-search expert with a somewhat turbulent history of nearly twenty-five years. This site forwards your search term to Google, Bing and Yahoo, among others. It has search sections for the web, images, videos, and news. Aside from an obscene content filter, there are hardly any options to set, unfortunately.

Excite has also been on the market for many years, but has already lost a lot of popularity. The web service uses Bing, among other things, but it’s not so clear what other ships the search engine is tapping into. As with Dogpile, you can set almost no preferences here.

Search engine WolframAlpha is undeniably focused on mathematical and scientific calculations. There’s even a tool that makes it easy to enter mathematical formulas. For example, enter the search term world population growth In addition to an interactive chart, you’ll also see various other demographic data such as life expectancy, annual births, and male/female distribution. You can refer to the resources used and click immediately. You can find inspiring examples at www.wolframalpha.com/examples.

If you have a Pro account (starting at $5.50 per month), you have more options at your disposal, such as adjusting the display or downloading basic data in a variety of formats.

If you’re more into academic publications, it’s hard to do without Google Scholar, which has more than two hundred million articles in its database. There was also Microsoft Academic with a similar amount of articles before, but unfortunately Microsoft pulled the plug on the project at the end of 2021. Its European counterparts include CORE (200 million documents) and German BASE (280 million documents). All databases allow exporting documents to BibTeX format, among others, and provide links to full text in PDF format.

It’s also worth mentioning Figshare because most documents, reports, photos and videos are presented in CC0 or CC BY in this database (see the ‘Creative Commons’ box). You can also upload your own data here.

Almost every museum has a digital collection worthy of its name. To name just two impressive examples, the Louvre’s digital collection contains nearly 500,000 works, and the City Museum of New York has digitized tens of thousands of objects allowing you to explore the city’s past.

Looking for a piece of art? A good general starting point then is the Canadian Artcyclopedia. This search engine doesn’t look very artistic, but you can find around 9,000 artists collected from around 3,000 art sites and museums. You can search by name (artist or museum) and work title.

Similar in design, but focusing on European (painting) art, Hungarian The Web Gallery of Art is produced by around 4,000 artists, with around 51,000 works. You can use the images free of charge for personal and educational purposes.

A must-see is the Google Arts & Culture Project, which features an online compilation of artworks from museums around the world. This often happens in story form, including virtual tours.

If you’re looking for literary works, you can’t do without Google Books. For this project, which started in 2004, Google scanned and digitized an unimaginable amount of books worldwide, especially in university libraries. Currently, over 600,000 books from the Netherlands alone can be consulted online.

For ebooks you have to go to Project Gutenberg. This is now a collection of over 60,000 free ebooks in epub and mobi format (Kindle). The focus here is on older artifacts, particularly American artifacts that are now in the public domain.

Those more interested in classical Dutch literature can visit Project Laurens Jz’s online library. cost. All existing works are copyright free. No texts have been added since 2001, but the Digital Library of Dutch Literature continued digitizing these ancient works.

For more contemporary ebooks and audiobooks you can of course refer to the online library, which is part of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek.

Need an image for your document or website? Although both Google and Bing search engines have an Images section, most of the results found are copyrighted. Then you still need to filter by usage right or license. Works best with Bing: via Licence You can choose a specific Creative Commons genre, such as Public property or Customizable† will be shared and used commercially†

It’s smarter to look for high-resolution stock images in the online collections of Pixabay (about 2.5 million photos) or Pxhere (about 1.25 million photos). Both sites only offer free photos that you can use commercially or even edit. On both websites, you can filter the results by criteria such as type, direction, theme, dimensions, and color. You must register for free to be able to download an eligible photo.

If you already have an image but are looking for something similar, TinEye may come in handy. You upload it to the official website or look at the url of the photo and TinEye immediately starts looking for comparable copies.

Both Bing and Google also offer such reverse search functionality. In Bing you press the button for it Search using an imageGoogle this Search by image† It should come as no surprise that such a function can also be useful for detecting any copyright infringement.

The deep web contains a lot of information (see the box at the bottom of this “Dark web” article) and this often includes any public database that may or may not be freely consulted. A typical example of this is the Land Registry. On the basis of address, you can request all kinds of information such as who owns the real estate, the purchase price and how much the mortgage is, housing report, cadastral map, for a fee. Here you will also find a link to a topographical time travel of nearly two hundred years.

On the website of the national government you will find numerous information from various ministries. Unless otherwise stated, the CC0 license applies to the documents presented here. NGR’s (National Georegister) website is also interesting. On this website, enter a search term and intended location for which you are looking for information, or open one of the categories such as: nature and environment† economy† society or health† You can further refine the information later, for example Licenses (among these public property† CC0 and CC-BY† You can add all selected parts to a map as separate layers.

In Belgium, you can review the Cadastre parcel plan for free on CadGIS. Log in to MyMinfin for more detailed information about your own properties. after that you can My home / See my real estate data Choose. You can also request other cadastral statements, but you have to pay for them.