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The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines
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."
I was expecting to see specialized search engines, rather than generalized ones that happen to use unusual algorithms. Things like Baidu Mp3 search or Astalavista; the ones that allow special-purpose searches that feeding them into google would just produce crap.
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.. I want "accurate"
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No, I have to say that Google's got to have come up on top because they've been giving fairly accurate results.
"Accurate" had nothing to do with it. In a time when having keywords was the way to get to the top of the popular search engines, Google implemented a social ranking system; it really wasn't about being accurate so much as it was about "if everyone thinks you're link worthy, then you're probably an authority on some subject."
There's plenty of talk about community-supported information and social networks, but Google was the first serious attempt at utilizing that information way before such discussions were popular.
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The article was written by an SEO. Who says he doesn't rank them by how easy they are for him to manipulate?
"...lies a vast multitude of the most innovative and creative search engines..."
They're innovative and creative, but nearly useless as well.
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
Closed domains have this thing called "Access Rights" - typically governed by either Novell Directory Services, or Microsoft Active Directory.
By and large, most enterprises don't want the janitor to be able to get on a kiosk terminal and surf the local search engine until he arrives at the document entitled FISCAL_YEAR_BRIBES_PAID_TO_MEMBERS_OF_THE_LOCAL_Z
So a "closed domain" document spider is gonna have to be granted Administrator/Supervisory rights to the authentication infrastructure [which is a HUGE security risk in and of itself], and then it's gonna have to keep track of the pertinent access control lists before deciding whether or not individual users have the right to view search results.
And if, as is typical, you've got four or five different authentication infrastructures in an enterprise [Novell Directory Services, Microsoft Active Directory, Sun iPlanet Directory Services, Oracle Internet Directory Services, etc etc etc], and if they aren't all tied together in some kinduva coherent LDAP framework, then that's just a massively complex project to even think about attempting to undertake.
Not so long ago, you'd see such a list as everyone using Yahoo!, Altavista, Hotbot and Google was mentionned with the 1% also-rans.
Time changes things, but not all that much. Some go up, some go down. I'd be willing to place a bet that some of their top-4 will dissappear in the next ten to twenty years while one of the also-rans will become a household name. *shrug*