7 Search Engines To Watch in 2010

Lets face it, Google is the dominating search engine, and will most likely continue to be that in the foreseeable future, there is several thousand alternative search engines that are working hard to gain a piece of the search market for themselves.

{The English language market for search is dominated by a few big behemoths. 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%), with smaller shares held on to by MapQuest, eBay, craigslist, Fox, MySpace, Facebook and Amazon.}

Still with each 1% slice of the search market valued at $3 Billion at yearly revenues of $332 million there is no need to conquer more than 0.1% percent of the market to make some 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 blog headlines are likely to gossip about. Not all of them are brand new, some are, but all have in common that they have been innovating in 2009 and they deliver high quality search results.

Cuil

With two ex Googlers, Anna Patterson and Russell Power, in the management team and by claiming to be the worlds biggest search engine Cuil 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 great and there is an explore by category function that is among the best I’ve seen.

DuckDuckGo

The search engine with the silly name and a cute interface combines Yahoo BOSS, Wikipedia and it’s own crawler DuckDuckBot to give you both hard information in a Zero-click info box, categories to further refine searches and of course the actual search results.

Founded by Gabriel Weinberg, who started and then sold The Names Database, DuckDuckGo is a private venture and 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

A totally awesome search engine, Spezify. It renders the search results as newspaper clippings scattered around the screen with a mix of images and excerpts from web pages. By browsing some of the clippings you get a excellent overview of the topic you are researching and can make an informed decision on which search results to visit and read more about.

It’s also a great brainstorming tool. You’ll get a ton of new ideas for your article or blog post just by entering your keyword into the search box and watching the resulting mix of clippings and photos.

Secret Search Engine Labs

This is a search engine that does not aim to rank sites the same way as the big three, G-Y-B. As Google gives priority to old and huge sites, many new, small-scale and relevant sites are difficult to find in their search results. The algorithm used by Secret Search Engine Labs ranks sites according to on page keywords and link anchor keywords and removes spam pages using the trademarked CashRank method.

A search engine that puts more weight on page content than on site age and 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 aim to grow over time into the best search engine on the Web.

Bing

First there was MSN Search, then Live Search and right now with the latest re-launch we have Bing. Now Microsoft has managed to grab almost 10% of the market share for search by running an aggressive marketing campaign. The media attention surrounding the re-launch has spurred innovation adding new functions like the daily change in background image, suggested topics and trends.

Watch Bing closely during 2010 as Microsoft has finally taken some honest action to grow their market share and it’s likely that you will see more changes over time.

Blekko

With a management that has worked at Topix, Google, AOL and Netscape Search this start-up search engine is as tight-lipped as Google about what they will do next and when.

We are still waiting for Blekkos public 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 hope it’s good and exciting news.

Monitter

Monitter is not a traditional search engine but a real time Twitter search where you can keep an eye on several keywords and see all tweets containing those keywords in real time as they are tweeted. Really cool for monitoring your area of expertise and joining in the conversation.

There Are More Search Engines, Right?

Google was left out of this 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 build the search results from information in databases, Wolfram Alpha will be an interesting venture to watch in the coming years.

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 tell if one of them will develop into a permanent player in the search market. You will find info on the majority of them in this list of search engines, in this other search engine list or on AltSearchengines.com a blog that reviews just about every new search engine.

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. There’s semantic search, visual presentation, real-time search and socially powered search engines popping up. If nothing else is achieved at least the old giants will have to adopt the new technology to stay relevant, giving us better search results in the process.