Directory
Search and Discovery gathers the tools people use to find things online. Dataset and data search covers portals that index public data, statistics, and open government records. Academic and research search looks through papers, citations, and scholarly archives, while general search engines and their tools cover everything from operator guides to alternative engines. Metasearch services query several engines at once, and image search, media search, and curated web directories fill in the specialised cases. News search, file and open directory search, and product and shopping search cover narrower needs. Topic names describe what each service searches, so you can tell a citation index from a general web engine before you open it. Some entries are experiments rather than finished products, so expect a mixed level of polish.
Snopes.com is an online reference resource that functions as a fact-checking site for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation. It is described as the definitive internet reference source for researching these types of content.
Biznar is a unified search tool for finding web pages, files, records, code, or internet intelligence.
Open directory search page for finding browsable folders and public file listings.
Video search engine for finding videos across multiple platforms and independent video sources.
Truth or Fiction is a fact-checking and content verification website that publishes articles evaluating the accuracy of viral social media claims, political statements, entertainment rumors, and other circulating online content. The site also publishes reviews of digital products and services, presenting research and context to help readers distinguish verified information from misinformation.
Yahoo's search engine for web results, news, images, videos, and related online content.
CRT Certificate Search, known as crt.sh, is a free certificate transparency log search tool from Sectigo, formerly Comodo CA. It accepts an identity such as a domain name or organization name, a certificate fingerprint in SHA-1 or SHA-256 form, or a crt.sh ID as search input. The tool is provided by Sectigo Limited.
Filetype search tool is a custom open source intelligence (OSINT) tool built for searching specific file types on the internet. It supports searches for DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX, PDF, and TXT file formats, and requires users to input one or more keywords and select a target file format to execute a search.
Pixsy is an image protection platform. It monitors the public internet for unauthorized use of user-uploaded images, provides filtering and search tools for detected matches, and supports takedown notices and compensation recovery for copyright infringement. The service also integrates with the US Copyright Office for official registration and handles legal cases on a no win, no fee basis.
Search-focused site for finding news, deals, and web results from a simple search page.
Direct Download Almost Anything is a search tool that locates direct download links for a wide range of content, including TV series, movies, books, music, software and games. It leverages Google advanced search and open directory search to find these links.
Disconnect Search is a private search service that proxies search queries for non-DuckDuckGo search engines through its platform to protect user privacy, supporting access to search engines across multiple global regions and allowing users to use their favorite search engine without their queries being tracked.
Mwmbl is an open source, non-profit web search engine that operates without ads, tracking or profit motive, and aims to serve as a replacement for commercial search engines. The project uses a centralized index with distributed volunteer-run web crawling, and community members determine search result rankings. Volunteers can contribute by running a command line crawler or installing a Firefox extension to help evaluate search ranking performance. Official documentation is available at https://book.mwmbl.org.
Talkwalker Alerts is a free web monitoring service that functions as an alternative to Google Alerts. It tracks mentions of brands, competitors, events or user-specified topics across the web, and sends real-time alerts to users’ email inboxes, RSS feeds or Slack accounts. Users can customize alert settings including source type (news, Twitter, blogs, discussion forums), result language (22 available options), delivery frequency, and whether to receive all results or only high-engagement mentions. The service is free to use.
Media search page for discovering images, videos, or related web content from online sources.
Beautiful News is a project by Information is Beautiful that publishes one original data chart per day covering underreported positive trends, uplifting statistics and creative solutions. All chart images are available for free use and download under a Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
DocumentCloud helps search public documents, archives, records, and research collections.
Keyword.io is a free keyword research tool that finds thousands of longtail keyword suggestions from sources including Google, Amazon, YouTube, eBay, Bing, Wikipedia and others. It is presented as requiring no signup and returning results instantly.
Reverse image search engine for finding where an image appears online and tracking similar copies.
Aware Online tool for searching archived web pages, snapshots, and older website versions.
Debunking False Stories Archives is a FactCheck.org collection of articles that debunk misinformation shared on social media. It also offers readers resources including an article and a video on how to combat misinformation. From late 2016 to early 2025, FactCheck.org worked with Meta to debunk misinformation on Meta’s social media platforms.
Document Search is a component of the OSINT Toolkit that provides a suite of public record and document search utilities. It supports searching for public documents across platforms including Google Drive, SlideShare, Amazon AWS, Dropbox, ISSUU, Scribd, Doc Stoc and Prezi, alongside searches for Companies House person and company records, SEC EDGAR filings, Pastebin posts, electoral roll entries, and hacker forum content. The toolkit also provides access to trending and popular Pastebin posts, UK legislation directories, case law databases, worldwide company data and country profiles.
Filesec.io is a public resource that provides an up-to-date list of file extensions used by attackers. It includes entries for extensions such as .exe and .doc, alongside associated attributes like executable status and supported operating systems including Windows and Mac.
Collection of search plugins that add site-specific search engines to browsers.
