I actually like WiseNut (wisenut.com) about as much as Google, maybe even a bit more. Nice clean interface, and very good results for most of my searches. (I have no affiliation with WiseNut) /*tom*/
It gives us much less results than google and it does not have all the pages indexed- as google almost does; So i think for a long time to go google will still be the leader
The OP is talking about the best underrated search engines No doubt Google is the leader But wisenut is underated but still a pretty good SE so it don't really matter if it gives less results J
Geez it seems like all teh small search engines are using google, msn or yahoo results. Its kinda sad...
You may want to have a look at http://www.metamend.com/search-engine-map.html which gives some good info regarding the various search engines. Well worth the read. As already mentioned Wisenut and Gigablast are the 2 main ones out there which appear to have their own index. You really should see this to get a better idea of what search engines utilize others indexes.
Hmm that would be difficult to answer if I told you what the best unknown search engine was it would require me to know it and then pass it on to you. That would then make it common knowledge, which makes it known. Thus it wouldn't be unknown.
Given the options, I'd have to vote for Gigablast also. I actually find it quite disheartening that there aren't more contenders to Google's throne than there are. Many of the suggestions listed in this thread are quite woeful, and that's being kind. Rightly or wrongly, I use one barometer to measure a SE's relevance (as a surfer, not a webmaster), and that's how one particular site of mine ranks. One of my sites is a non-commercial hobby site that's been around for years. It's become (slowly) something of an authority site in its niche and ranks in the top 3 for its major phrases in the main three engines. On all of the suggested sites in this thread (with the exception of Gigablast) it's nowhere to be found - buried under heaps of commercial or irrelevant sites (my other optimised, commercial sites do ok however). I really wish there were more options than there are, because I really don't think that the top 3 are anywhere close to good at the moment. Having said that though, perhaps that's because we webmasters are all too good at SEO. Phlegm...
http://aftervote.com/ is pretty nice. Shows cool details upon searching. Kind of like digg, only for SE's...
It was from a link @ http://searchenginez.com/popular_engines.html The image link is at http://common.ziffdavisinternet.com/util_get_image/2/0,3363,sz=1&i=23349,00.gif and a UK version is at http://www.alphaquad.co.uk/uk-search-engine-relationship-chart.htm
That's outdated. Yahoo has it's own crawled index. The human submissions and reviews are only in the directory. Same for Ask - except I don't think it has a directory.
I just looked at exalead - and for an EU search engine it's a bit weird. I searched in Dutch - I got nice dutch sites (so far no problem) but the ODP categories it linked to (yes, it uses the ODP) were in English, for some reason. I like the search suggestions though.