Where Google Meets Giggle: The Weirdest Search Engines Online

Last week, we entered the realm of the subversive recursive to see what happens when you use search engines to search for search engines. This week, we're bypassing the mirror-house madness to bring you a truly off-kilter collection of search engines that just could change the way you browse the Internet. Or kill five minutes here or there. You know — big picture stuff.

In no particular order:

The search engine so ghetto, it can't even spell ghetto correctly! is not their motto, but it should be. GhetoSearch's conceit is to flip the script on search results by presenting the last results first, thus giving innocent browsees like ourselves access to websites that they probably never would have come across otherwise. Just for the hell of it, I typed in “search engines” for my first query and hit upon the “Doorway Page WizardTM” as the foremost (aka, hindmost) result. Considering said Wizard purports to be "a revolutionary software application used by search engine optimization professionals worldwide," the irony was not lost on me.

Leaving the ghetto behind, let us now travel 13 years backwards into the future to arrive at:

Created in 1999 (yes — you can tell) by Mark Zeman as part of a Masters in Design at Massey University in New Zealand,

Searchbots.net is an experimental search engine that investigates the use of mythology, personification and game theory as motivational strategies in creating a sustainable search community.

Yeah, I know, a bit highfalutin, but the first step in creating your personal searchbot is to drag-and-drop different robot parts into a geometric Vitruvian template, so the subtext doesn't remain stuffy for long. After coloration and a brief debate between a “Yo Yo whatup” or “Hello, can I be of assistance?” personality chip, you then choose a word cloud of topics on which you'd like your bot to become an expert. One email address later and you're ready to start dragging floppy disk icons with different built-in parameters into your bot's gut, which will generate a regular report of "new and exciting websites" at the interval of your choosing.

I've just set up a monthly report on maroon technology, so Zod only knows what that'll get me. (Being a member of the red family, I could receive a list of diverse results containing information “about tomatoes, communism or angry people.”) Whether or not any of these forthcoming websites will, in fact, be new or exciting remains to be seen. However, if nothing else, Zeman at least sounds like Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords on the Flash video tutorial, so I'll always have that.

From bots to bugs, we come to:

Not only does BananaSlug have the coolest name of any search engine I've come across, it's also the only one that features an actual slug in its header. And if that weren't reason enough to adopt this little search engine that could, what if I told you that BananaSlug will automatically augment every search you run with another word, chosen at random, in order to provide you with a collection of results that you likely never would have come across otherwise?

Sure, you could simply type in an extra random word every time you Googled something, but why bother when BananaSlug will provide the search serendipity for you, free of thought? You can even customize the sorts of words that get added to your search, choosing between jargon words, emotions, and the major arcana and suits of the Tarot, among other blindingly obvious categories.

Speaking of the Tarot, if you think the death card is turning up just a little too frequently during your readings, why not try to figure out what it means over at:

With more Web 1.0 ugliness than your uncle's personal Angelfire diary, HorrorFind indexes nearly 10,000 horror-themed sites to help you Halloween party like it's 1999. Amazingly, the homepage claims to have been updated as recently as April of this year, which I assume means the disclaimer is still valid as well. All I can say is, it had better be, because with disclaiming like this, you're gonna need all the legal precedent you can find:

Disclaimer: HorrorFind.com disclaims any responsibility for your terror, horror, horrific nightmares, witch spells cast upon you, ghosts inhabiting your house, demons in your walls or in your head, severed hands that may choke or chase you, werewolves that may attack you, vampires that may kill or convert you, monsters who may eat or maim you, zombies who may take your brain, flesh-eating zombies who may attack you, distemper that may afflict you having become a werewolf, and/or any other horror or horrors that may or may not affect you in any or not any way. In other words your on your freaking own at HorrorFind.com!

Assuming your brain is still in one piece after that Ann Rice-ian acid trip, let’s wrap things up with a few

• New Search Engine Does Something Google Can’t
• A Trip Down the Recursive Rabbit Hole
• Creep Files: BP Buys Search Terms For ‘Oil Spill’