The Alternative Search Engines: ChaCha, Mahalo, & Squidoo

Whether it be looking for cheap electronics, gourmet restaurants, or something in between, search engines will almost always help you find what your looking for. They are like your trusty sidekicks, finding whatever you are searching for in a blink of an eye. But one day, while searching, they won't find what you were looking for. You'll be amazed. Your trusty sidekick failed. This is the time you'll come to realize that you can't just depend on the four major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Live, Ask). There are plenty of other search engines out there just waiting to be discovered.

ChaCha is a new search engine which launched in September 2006. ChaCha stands apart from other search engines as it offers free social searching. With over 20,000 guides, there is no wait time to be connected. The guides will search for answers to your question and normally provide at least three different websites within five minutes that answer your inquiry. With ChaCha, you can also ask the guides questions by text messaging from your cell phone. It is also rumored that in by Summer 2008 ChaCha will introduce callChaCha, in which people leave a voicemail with their question and ChaCha will text message them back with a answer. If you're a person who can't find what you want on the internet with ease, ChaCha may be your hero!

Mahalo was launched in May of 2007 by the co-founder of Weblogs. Being very different from many search engines, Mahalo is steadily rising in popularity. Instead of providing the standard search results, Mahalo and it's guides have made thousands of pages for popular searches. Each one of these pages include several links that have been evaluated to make sure they are informative and factual, thus eliminating the need to beware of false information. Each search result page will include areas such as news, photos, videos, blogs, fan sites, etc. The only downside of Mahalo is that not enough search result pages have been created. If finding informative results is a must-have for you, Mahalo will make your day everyday.

A third alternative to the big four is Squidoo. Squidoo was launched in October of 2005 and has an extremely large database of search results. Although Squidoo closely resembles Wikipedia, it has much more information on popular topics. Content is not reviewed and evaluated before being published on Squidoo, so if you need factual information, Squidoo won't help much. If you are just browsing the net for fun, Squdoo will offer you a world of information at your fingertips.

So next time the big four fail you, don't hesitate to try an alternative.