Every Friday on AltSearchEngines, we feature four really alternative search engines. YOOODLE.COM Yooodle bills itself as a very targeted search engine; a super-niche, I would say. Yooodle only searches for watch companies.

What’s in a name? While hiking the Swiss Alps, the founder heard some children playing in the distance, shouting and bouncing echoes off the mountain sides. One sounded like, “Yooodle,” and the rest is history.

Moving right along…

Sycarox Okay, here’s the deal with Sycarox – it is a search engine for “cheat codes” for video games. Enter your game as a search query, and Sycarox will return user submitted ways to cheat.

Alpinaut.com

Alpinaut! Alpinaut searches out route diagrams for rock climbing, ice climbing, caving (spelunking), canyoning, scuba diving, skin diving, sport climbing, hiking, skiing, snowshoeing, mountain biking, via ferrata (?), and free flying. (What next? Cow tipping?) The color coded pins are located all over the globe on a full color map of the world on this interesting alternative search engine for the more adventurous searcher.

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility, or GBIF, lets you search for
orgasms, oops, I mean, organisms; you know, like little tiny creatures.

On Tuesday, Alternative Search Engine Dabble, a video search engine that searches over 13 million videos, was the “Alt SE of the Day.”

Unsure of the meaning of the name Dabble, I ventured a few guesses:

How about the name “Dabble?” Is it:

1. To splash liquid gently and playfully?

2. To undertake something superficially or without serious intent?

3. To bob forward and under in shallow water so as to feed off the bottom?

4. A web application which allows users to create applications using a web browser?

Well, to settle the question, Dabble’s founder Mary Hodder wrote in and explained,

“When we were looking at Dabble as the name for the service, we interviewed a lot of users. Those users overwhelmingly said they liked Dabble because it sounded fun and like something they could do. Since these were not geeks but regular people, we asked why, and they pretty much all said that media was hard for them online, what with getting the right codec viewers to watch video, or uploading, or searching and browsing, or editing.

And Dabble just sounded fun and friendly. So it definitely means that to me, because once they said it, my own perception that it was fun was affirmed.”

We just feel really lucky to have it as our name: Dabble!