Here is a categorized guide to the best search engines or tools for specific types of tasks, with clickable links in the titles:
🔍 General Web Searches
| Task | Tool |
|---|---|
| Finding general info, definitions, or popular sites | |
| Searching with privacy | DuckDuckGo |
| Finding archived or dead pages | Wayback Machine (Internet Archive) |
| Checking latest news | Google News / Bing News |
📄 Academic & Research
| Task | Tool |
|---|---|
| Peer-reviewed papers | Google Scholar |
| Research papers, theses | Semantic Scholar / CORE |
| Library-level search | WorldCat |
🎨 Images & Design
| Task | Tool |
|---|---|
| Copyright-free images | Unsplash / Pexels / Pixabay |
| Reverse image search | Google Images / TinEye |
| AI-generated art | Lexica / Artbreeder |
🎥 Videos
| Task | Tool |
|---|---|
| Finding specific videos | YouTube Search / Google Video |
| Searching by video content | PimEyes / Google Lens |
🧰 Technical, Coding & Software
| Task | Tool |
|---|---|
| Programming solutions | Stack Overflow / GitHub / Google |
| Open-source software | SourceForge / FossHub |
| Installing apps via CLI | Winget (Windows) / Homebrew (Mac) |
📚 Books & Literature
| Task | Tool |
|---|---|
| Book summaries | Goodreads / Blinkist / BookRags |
| Free books | Project Gutenberg / LibGen / Open Library |
| Quotes or excerpts | Wikiquote / Goodreads Quotes |
🧠 AI-Enhanced Search
| Task | Tool |
|---|---|
| Natural language queries | Perplexity.ai / You.com / ChatGPT |
| Deep research and citations | Elicit / Consensus |
| Multimodal search (text + image/video) | Google Gemini / Bing Copilot |
Knowing the right search engine to use makes you more efferent, and helps you lesson the stress in getting things done.
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