Best Niche Search Engines

Find what other search engines can't

By
Tim Fisher
Photo of Tim Fisher, Lifewire GM and Writer
Tim Fisher
Senior Vice President & Group General Manager, Tech & Sustainability
  • Emporia State University

Tim Fisher has more than 30 years' of professional technology experience. He's been writing about tech for more than two decades and serves as the SVP and General Manager of Lifewire.

lifewire's editorial guidelines
Updated on September 8, 2022

Niche search engines are search engines designed to find very specific types of content. You can use them to unearth hidden gems, discover untapped sources of information, and uncover resources that you never even knew existed.

While there are a handful of wildly popular search engines that do a great job at locating most images and web pages, they don't always find what you're after.

The need to showcase niche search engines comes out of the fact that search engines don't search the entire web. The ones listed below are very specific in that they focus on things like books, medical information, images, math, videos, etc.

Complex equation being written on a chalkboard

Jeffrey Coolidge / Getty Images

Whether you need to solve a complicated math problem or look up scholarly discussions of eclipses, the following search engines can help you find solutions to a wide variety of mathematical and science-related questions.

  • Wolfram Alpha: This website has information and examples on math and science topics, among other subjects, and provides both a search engine and menus to browse through it all.
  • PDR.net: Search for any drug to learn why it's used, common brand names, dosage details, storage considerations, and more.
  • Khan Academy: One of the best reference sites on the web, you can search for all kinds of math and science questions to see videos, articles, exercises, and programs you can take part in to learn more.
  • SearchOnMath: This math search engine runs your query through several million formulas on a variety of math-related websites.
  • Google Scholar: One of Google's lesser-known search engines, this provides one text box to search through tons of academic research.
  • Consensus: Uses AI to instantly extract findings directly from scientific research.
A hand picking a book on a book shelf

 Dougal Waters / Getty Images

Whether you're looking for a rare book, a used book, an audiobook, or a comic book, chances are you can find it on the web using one of these excellent book search engines.

Couple taking a selfie

 Petri Oeschger / Getty Images

Search engines also exist within most social networking sites, plus there are cross-service search engines that can look for things on multiple social media sites simultaneously.

  • Twitter and Facebook are two examples of social media sites that you can search through to find information regarding other users and the people you follow or are friends with.
  • Social Searcher: A niche search engine for finding mentions, users, and trends across several social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube, and Reddit.

Images and Multimedia

Movie Theatre marquee

 joeygil / Getty Images

Whether you're looking for an image or an obscure video, or you simply want to see the latest and greatest movie trailers, a search engine is a great place to start.

  • Google Images: You can find nearly any image with Google Images because it scours through most of the observable web.
  • Yahoo Image Search: Similar to Google's, but it's from Yahoo.
  • Google Videos: This is similar to the company's image search tool, but it finds only videos.
  • YouTube: Although it doesn't search through multiple other sites at once like a true search engine, YouTube is the biggest video streaming site on the web, so it's a great place to search for videos.
  • IMSDb: Search for text from movie scripts. This one isn't technically multimedia, but it's related.
boy wearing virtual reality goggles in floating sphere

 Donald Iain Smith / Getty Images

Finding people, communicating with people, keeping in touch with people....these activities are the most popular on the web, and with good reason. Use people search engines to connect with others you might have lost touch with.

world wide web letter blocks being held by hands

 John Rensten / Getty Images

An invisible web search engine finds content that a regular search engine doesn't catalog. The invisible web, also called the deep web and hidden web, is a huge part of the web that you can't find unless you use a special search engine.

  • Wayback Machine: Find archives of web pages from years ago to just a few minutes in the past.
  • The National Security Archive: Use this niche search engine to find declassified documents and other data regarding U.S. national security, foreign policy, military history, and more.
Was this page helpful?