Better search is always good, but as a lot of people have been expressing, searching in natural language (“what is the capital of France?”) is not too useful for anyone who has used the Internet up to now. What I would like to see in a search engine is one that can differentiate “free” products from “free download!” or “free 30 day trial!”

Anyway for such a dominated market with Google going on over 60% market share (and even more mind share) a lot of competitors pop up quite frequently. For many niche markets and specific type searches these can be much better, so here are a couple of the better ones:

FilesTube

A search engine for file sharing. FilesTube indexes downloadable files across the Internet. Works quite well, especially with the filtering of files to ‘mp3’, ‘mpeg’ etc.

PDF Search Engine

A search engine for PDFs, E-Books and other electronic documents. Has simple but effective searching.

Twingly

Mentioned it here a few days ago. A new blog search engine, I’m interested to see who it manages to compete against the larger but ailing Technorati which recently got a new round of funding.

Icon Look

I’ve seen a few Icon search engines but Icon Look is the best one I’ve used both results wise and its interface. You’ll find both small and high resolution icons, a useful resource for anyone doing design work.

Retrevo

This service is designed to match a product with a manual. Actually a very good search engine for doing product research before purchasing.

Look Torrent

I used Scrape Torrent for quite some time, but I recently found Look Torrent which is an awesome search engine for finding torrent files. Its best feature is the option to select your favourite torrent sites for it to search.