While Google is the leading search engine, and will most likely continue to be that for a long time, there is several thousand lesser search engines that work hard to gain a part of the search marketplace for themselves.
The marketplace for search is dominated by a few big behemoths. According to 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 ), with smaller shares held on to by MapQuest, eBay, craigslist, Fox, MySpace, Facebook and Amazon.
With each 1 of the search market having a value of $3 Billion at yearly revenues of $332 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 a growing number of start up search engines.
This is the top 7 search engines that the 2010 news stories are likely to gossip around. New or old, they all have in common that they deliver high quality search results and they have been innovating during 2009.
Cuil
Cuil is one of the few new 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.
Overloaded servers generating low quality search results hampered the 2008 launch giving Cuil a fair amount of negative media attention but of you try a search 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
Sporting a Zero click information box with facts about your search term, categories to refine your search and by designating the official site for the search term this search engine combines results from Yahoo BOSS, Wikipedia and it s own crawler DuckDuckBot to give you cute and pretty useful search results.
Founded by Gabriel Weinberg, who started and then sold The Names Database, DuckDuckGo is a private venture that has grown steadily since it s launch in September 2008. I think this search engine has a good niche carved out for itself, watch out for this search engine in 2010
Spezify
This search engine is totally awesome. It presents the search results as newspaper clippings pasted all over the screen with a mix of photos and quotes from web pages. By looking through some of the clippings you get a good overview of the matter you are researching and can make an informed decision on which search results to visit and read more about.
Spezify is very useful tool for brainstorming. You ll get a log of new ideas for your article or blog post just by typing your keyword into the search box and watching the resulting mix of clippings and photos.
Secret Search Engine Labs
This search engine ranks sites differently than the big mainstream search engines. There is a lot of new and smaller websites that has a hard time showing up in the Google search results as the giant has a notorious preference for old, established authority sites. Secret Search Engine Labs ranks sites based on page contents and links using their trademark CashRank algorithm to filter out questionable content.
A search engine that puts more emphasis on page content than on site age and authority and that provides useful information to website owners on how the search results are calculated, Secret Search Engine Labs was started in 2007 by Finnish software engineer and entrepreneur Simon Byholm with the aim to grow slowly into the best search engine on the Internet.
Bing
Bing is a re branding of Microsoft s Live Search that was at one time MSN Search. Now Microsoft has managed to get hold of almost 10 of the marketplace for search by running a bold marketing campaign. As part of the re launch there has been a decent amount of new functionality, like related topics using the technology from the search engine Powerset that they acquired in 2008.
Watch Bing closely during 2010 as Microsoft has finally taken some real action to increase their market share and it s likely that we ll see more changes over time.
Blekko
This is a fresh start up that is keeps it s mouth shut almost as well as Google itself when you ask for the what and 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.
We are still waiting eagerly for Blekkos official launch. It was promised by the end of 2009 though so you can expect it to make some serious headlines in 2010. Let s hope it s exiting news.
Monitter
This is a real time Twitter monitor with reply and re tweet options. You input three keywords and after some processing the latest Twitter posts that contains your keywords start to roll down the screen in three separate columns. When you have a need to monitor you niche or area of expertise or if you just want to keep an eye on the conversation this is a great tool.
What About The Rest?
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. Being the only well known search engine to create the search results from information in databases, Wolfram Alpha will be an interesting project to watch in the years to come.
In addition to my list of seven there is also a horde of new social and real time search engines launching and there s no way to know if one of them will become a permanent player in the search market. You ll find more information about these and thousands more at AltSearchengines.com
There is now signs that we could see radical changes in the search engine landscape following years of rule by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. There s so much new technology out there. New search engines making use of social networks, visual presentation, new semantic algorithms and real time results to stand out from the crown are popping up everywhere. The result, even if we get no new top three, is that the ruling giants will have to keep innovating to keep up with the crowd and in the end we ll get a better search experience.
Author Resource:
Simon Byholm is the founder and CEO of Secret Search Engine Labs, an internet search engine with alternative search results and tools for webmasters and SEO professionals.
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