How do you find smaller, lesser known sites?

[dvduval]

Now that Google is focusing more on displaying sites with a higher PageRank, which seach engine is best to use for finding smaller, lesser known sites?

[lazerzubb]

Well i would say Teoma, i don't like there results that much, but you often find smaller sites in the top serp's.

[4eyes]

I still use Google, I just use more unusual requests to try to throw out all the 'tightly focused and highly optimised' pages.

I try to think of phrases that might be on the less well optimised sites.

It sometimes works to just throw in a few 'off the wall' words as well.

eg. 'used cars' v 'used cars courtesy'

'used cars' has high PR7 and PR8 sites at the top
'used cars courtesy' has PR4 and PR3 at the top

The second lot are still relevant,they are just the smaller guys who included the word 'courtesy' in their sales pitch.

[rcjordan]

If I'm spelunking, I give metaeureka.com a try. Look at the feeds they use;

AltaVista, AOL, Dmoz, Excite, HotBot, Fast, FindWhat, Lycos, MetaMission, MSN, Teoma, Voila, Yahoo, WiseNut, 7search

[Eric_Jarvis]

the other way is to dive right down to the bottom of teh search results rather than read from the top

I miss having a wide range of very different search engines...they are all too similar at the moment

[mack]

when ever i want to find smaller sites i still use google but be a lot more specific about what i am looking for, then i would look a few pages on in the serps. Smaller sites are sometimes the best sources you can find :)

[wasmith]

>> How do you find smaller, lesser known sites?

I find two or three large sites and search for the information that will be included in the link text to each and every one of the set.

The results are a page of researched links which link to sites with a common theme of all three sites, and many more smaller sites.