Search is so much more than “the big 3″ (Google, Yahoo and Live). Charles Knight at AltSearchEngines publishes a very interesting monthly list of 100 top alternative search engines. Now he has nominated 10 search engines for the Search Engine of the Year Award.

AltSearchEngines is a blog about — you guessed it — alternative search engines. The goal is to be the definitive destination for everything related to alternative search engines — over 1,000 of them. You won’t find in-depth info on all 1000 yet, but the blog is still quite young.

On December 3 AltSearchEngines will announce the alternative search engine of the year. Read on for a presentation of the nominees.

AfterVote calls itself a social search engine. It is a metasearch engine that presents results from Google, Yahoo and Live and shows you how each site ranks in these search engines as well as the Google PageRank and Alexa rank. The social aspect is that registered users can “vote up” a site among the result and post comments. These comments become visible in the search results. They will have to have a lot of active users before the social aspect gets really useful, though.

Answers.com is a free one-stop shop with information on over 4 million topics. The results are not lists of links, but excerpts of articles from e.g. Wikipedia, Oxford University press and other reference publishers. Even though the site has too many ads in our opinion, it’s a great source of information with lots of useful features.

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