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The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines

Posted by ryuzaki0 on

ReadWriteWeb writes "Search Engine Optimizer (SEO) Charles S. Knight has compiled a list of the top 100 alternative search engines. The list includes Artificial Intelligence systems, Clustering engines, Recommendation Search engines, Metasearch, and many more hidden gems of search. People use four main search engines for 99.99% of their searches: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com (in that order). But Knight has discovered, via his work as an SEO, that in the other .01% lies a vast multitude of the most innovative and creative search engines around."

8 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Intranet Vs Internet by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Informative

    As with most lists, I've got some nitpicking to do.

    All the large companies I've worked for don't care about world wide web search engines. Those engines used by the populace with the revenue coming from ads or 'paid search' or some indirect service business model. Now, a lot of companies are interested in Enterprise Search Engines and would pay a lot of money directly to a search engine company to come in and set up the technology to do intranet searches.

    The engine we currently use at my fortune 500 company sucks. I mean it is the worst. I would rather have a blindfold on with stumps for hands trying to type in an estimation of the internal IP address than use our search engine. That said, I have been told that we investigated using "Google Technology" although my superiors soon found that it wasn't at all better than what we already had. And so I've heard of a few others that have doubted Google's ability to dominate in a closed domain. They are clearly the winners in an open domain internet search but I haven't seen anyone take advantage of it as well internally ... yet.

    So while the external market may be broken down 99.99 to 0.01, the internal enterprise search side isn't that lopsided.

    Two engines that I've used and found to be novel ideas are BrightPlanet's Deep Query Manager and Collexis (NIH demo). DQM is able to extract data from databases that are available through search on the local page but are not indexed by Google. DQM has you create jobs since they take so long to run. Collexis can process raw text and fingerprint it, then compare that fingerprint to documents that have been fingerprinted quickly. Two ideas that Google, MSN & Yahoo! don't really cover. I find it odd that a site like Yoople (what appears to be a slow German Google) made it on this list but not DQM.

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    My work here is dung.
    1. Re:Intranet Vs Internet by JehCt · · Score: 4, Informative

      Could it be that your internal search sucks because your internal data is poorly organized, poorly written, and poorly tagged? Google isn't very good at finding stuff without the necessary clues. Search is only as good as the data stream. That's why SEOs always have lots of work - so many bad websites, so little time. If you know what you want, Google is great. If you don't know what you want (don't know the keywords), read Wikipedia to learn what to ask for.

  2. Source code search engine? by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 2, Informative

    Does slashdot or Sourceforge have a decent search engine to look for source code, sample code for particular APIs ?

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  3. The list is bad by Qbertino · · Score: 4, Informative

    Vivisimo not among the top 100? This is silly. Vivisimo is the first I turn to when Google fails to deliver. And they cover Googles shortcomings very well.
    In my book (and that of many others) Vivisimo is SE #2. And for good reasons too.

    www.vivisimo.com

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    We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
    1. Re:The list is bad by kamil_chatrnuch · · Score: 5, Informative

      http://www.vivisimo.com/ is the company.

      however, their search engine can be found here: http://clusty.com/ , which also appears to be in the list.
      maybe you also want to re-bookmark it, as the page is much nicer :)

  4. Many of these use a top-4 backend by Pigeon451 · · Score: 5, Informative
    This list is junk.

    A9 uses MSN or Google, SimplyGoogle uses Google, Soople uses Google, etc, etc, etc. They just provide a new or innovate method of presenting the results, the result order is still the same.

    Also, Digg is listed? Del.icio.us? AOL???

    I'd rather have a top-10 list of REAL alternative search engines, not "portals" and such written by a SEO of a search engine optimization company.

  5. Re:Source of marketing data? by CSKnight · · Score: 2, Informative

    Try this link: http://www.skrenta.com/2006/12/googles_true_search _market_sha.html Google 70.6% Yahoo! 18.7% MSN 8.9% Ask.com 1.7% Do the math! :-) Total = 99.99%

  6. Re:Wanted: Old school search engine by justthinkit · · Score: 2, Informative

    Thanks for the suggestion. For the curious, it is now called Clusty.

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