LibGuides: Grey Literature: Search engines

Search engines (other than Google)

Search results from many of the most popular search engines can be influenced by advertisers, governments, and user behaviour. Here are some alternative search engines which are more deliberate and transparent about privacy, tracking, and advertisers. Try some of these out and see if you surface grey literature that you wouldn't have found otherwise!

Brave
Privacy focused search engine and browser which offers transparency on search result rankings. Uses it's own index, so not tied to Microsoft or Google for results.
DuckDuckGo
A private web browser that doesn't track your location or search history, so that your search results are not affected by the "filter bubble".
Kagi
Subscription model search engine with results not influenced by advertisers. User data not tracked and no paid results pushed to the top. Users have to pay to use this search engine.
Semantic Scholar
AI based search for scholarly articles similar to Google Scholar.
SwissCows
Anonymous search engine which does not track or store data from users. Bills itself as "family friendly" and the "European answer to Google & Co."

Advanced Google Searching

Google has advanced search features which can be used for more targeted searching of grey literature.

There are two ways to do this: 1) Use advanced operators in the search bar or 2) use the Advanced search form

Examples of advanced operators:

Site/domain searching - To find results from a specific website or type of organization

site:uvic.ca will find results from the University of Victoria
site:gov.bc.ca for results from the BC Government
site:org for or non-profit and non-governmental organizations
site:edu for american colleague/university

File type - You can specify a file type to narrow down your results

filetype:ppt if you are looking for presentations that match your topic
filetype:pdf if you want to see reports that match your topic

Explore other options on the Advanced search form.

In the example below the search for "digital health" is restricted to PDF documents from the Government of BC.