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Alternative search engines offer revolutionary search methods.
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New search engines making search interesting. Photo: Seth Wenig
Google has long dominated the search engine market. However, many creative, up-and-coming search engines are generating great new ideas, functionalities and customization. Though the market share of these new engines is minimal, they are influencing how we search already and are a sign to come of what search engines may look and feel like in the future.
Wolfram\Alpha was developed by Wolfram Research out of Champaign, IL. Their search engine is a computational knowledge engine. Basically, it generates search results by performing a computational analysis of your search terms, rather than searching the Internet and returning links.
The main weakness of Wolfram\Alpha is its inability to return search results on things that are clearly known and mostly public. It deals only with facts and not opinions, as it relies on its computational model.
Wolfram\Alpha's main strength is that it’s very good with mathematics, sciences and other subjects built upon hard facts. Their formulas return highly relevant hits, utilizing their complicated system. As they grow, the range of their subject matter will definitely increase.
Another revolutionary new search engine is Twine. Twine was developed by Radar Networks out of San Francisco, CA. Twine was heralded as the first mainstream, “semantic” search engine application. The concept behind Twine is that it looks at content and quickly parses it automatically for the names of people, places, organizations and other subjects. The semantic search is faster and smarter than regular text search. However, in the current version, many users have complained that it doesn’t work very well and is too disorganized.
Searchme.com is based out of Mountain View, CA. Searchme.com is unique in allowing users to shuffle through image based results rather than text links.
DuckDuckGo is another new search company based out of Valley Forge, PA. On DuckDuckGo’s web site, they claim to be an improvement on other search engines by including zero-click information, category pages, ambiguous keyword detection, simpler links, and less spam.
I did a lot of research for this article on up-and-coming search engines in development and was disappointed at not finding any from the Seattle area. Though we are home to one of Google’s main offices (Kirkland) and home to Microsoft, I wasn’t able to easily find information on anything any pioneering entrepreneurs in the Seattle area working on revolutionary new search engines.
Please contact me at my Examiner email address if you have any information on search engine pioneers currently developing new methods of search in the Seattle area, or if you are one. I’m a firm believer search competition with Google, MSN, Yahoo and Ask.com will benefit advertisers and consumers alike.
Sources: Go here.
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