Which Search Engine? The List to Watch in 2010
While Google is the dominating search engine, and will most likely continue to be that for a long time, there is thousands of alternative search engines that are working hard to gain a piece of the search market for themselves.
{The market for search is dominated by a few big behemoths. According to a report by comScore the market in October 2009 was dominated by Google (65.4%), Yahoo (18.0%), Microsoft (9.9%), Ask (3.9%) and AOL (2.9%), followed by MapQuest, eBay, craigslist, Fox, MySpace, Facebook and Amazon.}
With the search marketplace valued at 0 Billion that makes every single 1% worth Billion when selling the company and you would do well by taking just a 0.1% piece of that cake. That’s why we will continue to see an increasing number of start up search engines.
This is my list of 7 search engines that stand a good chance of making news in 2010. New or old, all of them have in common that they deliver high quality search results and they have been innovating during 2009.
Cuil
Cuil is one of the few start-up search engines that is competing head to head with Google on index size and by claiming to be the worlds biggest search engine, managers and ex Googlers Anna Patterson and Russell Power has a lot to deliver.
The initial launch in 2008 was hampered by overloaded servers that spit out exceptionally bad search results, but visiting Cuil you will find that the search results today are good and the Explore by Category function down to the right is one of the best.
DuckDuckGo
The search engine with the silly name and a cute interface uses a combination of Yahoo BOSS, Wikipedia and it’s own crawler DuckDuckBot to create both hard information in a Zero-click information box, categories to further refine searches and the actual search results.
DuckDuckGo was launched in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg and is a private venture that has been growing steadily during 2009. Watch out for this search engine in 2010, it has a fine niche carved out for itself
Spezify
A totally awesome search engine, Spezify. It draws the search results as newspaper clippings scattered around the screen with a mix of images and excerpts from web pages. By scanning some of the clippings you get a excellent overview of the theme you are researching and can make an educated decision on which search results to visit and read more about.
Spezify is very handy tool for brainstorming. You’ll get a ton of new ideas for your article or blog post just by typing your keyword into the search box and watching the resulting collage.
Secret Search Engine Labs
This search engine ranks web pages differently than the big mainstream search engines. There is many new and smaller websites that has difficulty showing up in the Google search results as the giant has a notorious preference for aged, established authority sites. Secret Search Engine Labs gives rank to sites based on page contents and links using their trademark CashRank algorithm to filter out junk content.
Secret Search Engine Labs was initiated in 2007 by Simon Byholm, a software engineer and entrepreneur from Finland, and in addition to relevant and novel search results it aims to provide tools and information for webmasters on how pages are ranked.
Bing
First we had MSN Search, then Live Search and now with the latest re-branding we have Bing. With a forceful marketing campaign Microsoft has managed to grab almost 10% of the marketplace for web search. As part of the re-branding there has been a decent amount of new functionality, like related categories using the know how from the search engine Powerset that they acquired in 2008.
Watch Bing closely during 2010 as Microsoft has finally taken some honest action to grow their market share and it’s likely that we’ll see more changes coming.
Blekko
This is a fresh start-up that is keeps it’s mouth shut almost as well as Old Google when asked for the what or the when of their new search engine. The strong management team with former employees from Topix, Google, AOL and Netscape Search makes me believe they have something fascinating going on.
At the time of writing (mid December 2009) they have still not launched but with a promised launch date in the end of 2009 this search engine will make big news in 2010. Let’s hope it’s exiting news.
Monitter
Monitter is not a traditional search engine but a real time Twitter search where you can monitor several keywords and see all tweets containing those keywords in real time as they are tweeted. When you need to monitor you niche or area of expertise or if you just want to track the conversation this is a great tool.
There Are More Search Engines, Right?
Google was left out of the list as you already know that they are innovating and they will most likely make it into the news in 2010. Wolfram Alpha is fascinating as it is the only major search engine that makes the results from data.
There’s a horde of social, real time or just odd search engines launching and there’s no telling if one of them develops into the next Twitter and makes a permanent mark in the search marketplace. You’ll find info on most of them in this list of search engines, in this other search engine list or on AltSearchengines.com a blog that lists just about every new search engine.
There is now signs that we could see radical changes in the search engine landscape after years of rule by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and to some extent Ask. There’s so much new technology on display. New search engines making use of social networks, visual presentation, new semantic algorithms and real-time results to stand out from the crown are appearing everywhere. If nothing else is achieved at least the old dinosaurs will have to adapt to the new technology to stay competitive, giving us better search results in the process.
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