7 Search Engines To Watch in 2010

By Article Guy On February 10, 2010 Under Search Engine Optimization

With Google defending its position as king of search, and with Google intending to hold on to that position, there is in the dark alleys of the Internet thousands of lesser search engines fighting to get a piece of the lucrative search market.

{The marketplace for search is by a large part made up of a few giants. 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 valued at 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. The amount of start up search engines is only going to increase with more venture capital wanting a slice of the market.

Here’s my list of 7 search engines that stand a good chance of making news in 2010. 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 start-up search engines that compete head to head with Google on index size and with the claim of being 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 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 great 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 further 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 neat and pretty useful search results.

DuckDuckGo was launched in September 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg and is a private venture that has been growing steadily during 2009. I think this search engine has a good niche carved out for itself, watch out for what they do in 2010

Spezify

This search engine is just totally cool. The search results are presented as photos and newspaper clippings spread out on the screen, the clippings having one paragraph quotes from the result web page. By browsing 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 click on and read more about.

Spezify is very handy tool for brainstorming. Just type in a theme and you’ll get a lot of ideas for a new article or blog post.

Secret Search Engine Labs

This is a search engine that does not try to rank sites the same way as the big three, G-Y-B. As Google gives priority to mature and large sites, many new, small and relevant sites are hard to find in their search results. Secret Search Engine Labs ranks sites based on page contents and links using their trademark CashRank algorithm to remove questionable content.

A search engine that puts more emphasis on web page content than on site authority and that provides useful information to webmasters 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 goal to grow slowly into the best search engine on the Web.

Bing

Bing is a re-branding of Microsoft’s Live Search that was at one time MSN Search. Just now Microsoft has managed to grab almost 10% of the market share for search by running a bold marketing campaign. As part of the re-launch there has been a fair amount of new features, like related categories using the know how from the search engine Powerset that Microsoft acquired in 2008.

With Microsoft working fiercely to increase Bing’s market share you should watch them closely during 2010.

Blekko

This is a fresh start-up that is keeps it’s secrets almost as well as Old Google when asked for the what or the when of their new search engine. The rugged 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 for Blekkos official launch. It was promised by the end of 2009 though so you can assume that it will make some serious headlines in 2010. We can only wish that it’s good and exciting news.

Monitter

This is a real time Twitter monitor with reply and re-tweet options. You input three keywords and after a bit of processing the latest Twitter posts containing your keywords start to roll down the screen in three separate columns. Really cool for keeping an eye on your niche and joining in the conversation.

There Are More Search Engines, Right?

Chances are you know that Google is innovating and there is no doubt they will make it into the news in 2010. Wolfram Alpha is interesting as it is the only major search engine to make it’s search results from data.

There’s a multitude of social, real time or just weird search engines starting up and there’s no telling if one of them develops into the next Twitter and grabs it’s share of the search marketplace. You’ll 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.

There is now signs that we could see big changes in the search engine landscape following years of rule by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and to some extent Ask. 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 popping up everywhere. The result, even if we don’t get a new top three, is that the ruling behemoths will have to keep innovating to keep up with the crowd and in the end we’ll get a better search experience.