7 Search Engines That You Can’t Afford to Miss
Lets face it, Google is the leading search engine, and will likely continue to be that for a long time, there is thousands of alternative search engines that are working hard to gain a part of the search market for themselves.
{The English language market for search is dominated by a few big behemoths. According to a report by comScore the market for search in October 2009 was dominated by Google (65.4%), Yahoo (18.0%), Microsoft (9.9%), Ask (3.9%) and AOL (2.9%), MapQuest, eBay, craigslist, Fox, MySpace, Facebook and Amazon.}
Still with each 1% slice of the search market having a value of Billion at yearly revenues of 2 million there is no need to conquer more than 0.1% percent of the market to make serious money. That’s why we’ll continue to see an increasing number of start up search engines.
This is the top 7 search engines that the 2010 news stories are likely to gossip about. Not all of them are brand new, some are, but all have in common that they have been innovating in 2009 and they deliver good search results.
Cuil
With two ex Googlers, Anna Patterson and Russell Power, in the management team and by claiming to be the worlds biggest search engine Cuil has a lot to deliver.
Overloaded servers that generated low quality search results hampered the initial 2008 launch giving Cuil a fair amount of negative media attention but of you try it out today you’ll find the search results are really good and there is an explore by category function that is among the best I’ve seen.
DuckDuckGo
The search engine with the silly name and a cute interface combines Yahoo BOSS, Wikipedia and it’s own crawler DuckDuckBot to deliver both hard information in a Zero-click info box, categories to further refine searches and the actual search results.
Founded by Gabriel Weinberg, who started and then sold The Names Database, DuckDuckGo is a private venture and has grown steadily since it’s launch in September 2008. I think this search engine has a clear niche carved out for itself, watch out for this search engine in 2010
Spezify
This search engine is just totally awesome. The search results are rendered as images and newspaper clippings spread out on the computer screen, the clippings being made of one paragraph excerpts from the result web site. By scanning some of the clippings you get a good overview of the theme you are researching and can make an educated decision on which search results to click on and read more about.
It’s also a great brainstorming tool. Just type in a theme and you’ll get a ton of ideas for a new article or blog post.
Secret Search Engine Labs
This is a search engine that does not aim to rank sites the same way as the big three, G-Y-B. There is many new and small-scale websites that has difficulty getting a good rank in the Google search results as the giant has a notorious preference for old, established authority sites. The algorithm used by Secret Search Engine Labs ranks web pages according to on page keywords and link anchor keywords and removes junk pages using the trademarked CashRank method.
Secret Search Engine Labs was initiated in 2007 by Simon Byholm, a software engineer and entrepreneur from Finland, and in addition to relevant and different search results it aims to provide tools and info for webmasters on how webpages are ranked.
Bing
First there was MSN Search, then Live Search and right now with the latest re-branding we have Bing. These days Microsoft has managed to grab almost 10% of the market share for web search by running a bold marketing campaign. As part of the relaunch there has been a decent amount of new functionality, like related categories using the know how from the search engine Powerset that Microsoft acquired in 2008.
Watch Bing closely in 2010 as Microsoft has finally taken some real action to grow their market share and it’s likely that you will see more changes over time.
Blekko
With a management team with backgrounds Topix, Google, AOL and Netscape Search this start-up search engine is as secretive as Google about what they will do next and when.
At the time of writing in early December 2009 they have still not opened to the public but with the launch scheduled for the end of 2009 this search engine will make big news in 2010. Let’s hope it’s exiting news.
Monitter
This is a real-time Twitter monitor with reply and re-tweet options. You fill in three keywords and after some processing the latest Twitter posts containing your keywords start rolling down the screen in three separate columns. Really neat for keeping an eye on your area of expertise and joining in the conversation.
What About The Rest?
Chances are you already know that Google is innovating and there is no doubt they will make it into the news in 2010. Wolfram Alpha is fascinating as it is the only major search engine to make it’s search results from data.
In addition to my list of seven there is also a multitude of new social and real-time search engines coming and there’s no way to know if one of them will become a permanent player in the search market. You will find more information about these in the big list of search engines maintained by Secret Search Engine Labs, in this search engine list on Hubpages or on AltSearchEngines.com a blog that lists just about every new search engine launched.
After many years of Google – Yahoo – Microsoft rule there is now signs of radical changes in the search landscape. There’s so much new technology out there. New search engines using social networks, visual presentation, new semantic algorithms and real-time results to stand out from the crown are appearing everywhere. The result, even if we get no new top three, is that the ruling dinosaurs will have to keep innovating to keep up with the crowd and in the end we’ll get a better search experience.
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