At www.AltSearchEngines.com, we have been working along these same lines. AltSearchEngines, the newest blog from Read/WriteWeb, covers dozens (actually hundreds) of alternative search engines.

Every month we feature the "Top 100" of these; the criteria being some particular improvement over the traditional "Big 3" major search engines.

I'd like to invite you and your readers to stop by. The way the major search engines ignore these alternative marvels reminds me of how the "Big 3" U.S. automakers ignored those pesky Japanese imports...

Charles Knight, editor
AltSearchEngines.com

Here's an idea in case anyone from Google (or Yahoo or MSN or Ask or...) wants to pick up on it - dramatically more expanded meta tagging in your search index. As an example; current awareness provider Moreover Technologies (before VeriSign bought the company and ruined it) filtered news source sites by 30+ different meta tags when presenting results to assure that information was relevant (e.g. so you didn't see news on Ace Hardware when you were looking for information on Ace Insurance). How about giving searchers a way to filter search results based on several index criteria (I mean, beyond what "Advanced Search" now offers)?

This wouldn't even have to a lot of work for the search engine; Google (or whoever) could provide webmasters with a list of questions to answer in order to be included in the meta-indexed search (industry sector, commercial or non-profit, countries of operation, etc.). Just a thought. There may be even be some ex-Moreover talent floating around that could help with this.

But most of these niche search engines depend or plan to depend for revenue on distributing ads from Google, Ask.com or third-party networks. (ZoomInfo gets ads from Ask.)

Google doesn't really care if you use its search; it only cares if you click on its ads.

So boutique search services offer increased distribution of search ads, rather than competition to web search providers.

Google still needs to compete with other search providers to win partnerships with the boutiques, of course.

I entered "small public tech companies" into zoominfo and google. zoominfo gave me exactly one hit: "Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT)". Google had a few million hits but the first one was: "FORTUNE Small Business 100 2007: Full list". And there were 2 other relevant ones on the first page. So I guess this is a win for google. Microsoft's live.com was very similar to google by the way. I think natural language processing has a long way to go.

One issue that I have run into in the last six weeks is that Google is censoring search results. From October of 2006 on, Google Image Search has been throwing traffic at sites with images and relevant text.

Starting in early July, they started picking topics that they did not want to support with traffic. What happened? More people are using search engines that are not censoring. The searches are now coming from Altavista, AllTheWeb.com, Yahoo Image Search. Most is coming from Yahoo Image Search.

The Google-censored searches are all of people looking for altered images ("fakes").

Old news to me...Globalspec.com, Thomasregister.net and others of their ilk have been around since the start of the Web. Maypraps their only problem is getting more of the busines community to know about them.
Cheers!

Google has NEVER provided a truly comprehensive and concise search of what users really want, simply because Google's supposedly sophisticated search algorithm is actually very simplistic when compared to what people really want.

Take my company, worldlanguage.com as an example of this. We sell a category of products, language products, that is actually a large market of multiple categories of products multiplied by numerous languages. But, no one looks by "language products", they look for specific languages and categories of products. The navigational structure of our site was built to serve just that and we have, by far, the most comprehensive selection of products and information. Unfortunately we struggle just to be a bit player with Google precisely because of the navigational structure of our site and I can honestly say that the limitatins of Google has cost us millions in lost sales. Even if we accept as a point of argument that we suck at retailing, most users would want to peruse our site and see all of what is available for what they are looking for just to see what are their options. But, because of the very comprehensiveness of our information and products lists, Google cannot rank us so users can find us. We finally realized out web site navigation structure is extremely useful to users, but sucks for Google's supposedly sophisticated search algorithms. So now we are being forced into ugly and stupid tricks just to try and do for Google what Google should be able to do for itself.

The problem here is one of aggregation of data under different categories and combination of categories that Google's current methods simply are too stupid to comprehend. That is, "Language Products" covers hundreds of languages and scores of categories of product types. When a user starts looking for something like "Learn Japanese", Google goes to a specific site that is tailored to that language and that category of product. But if the user also might want Japanese Windows for their PC and dual boot software as well (a common thing for people who need to be fluent in another language for business), then Google leaves them floundering around pulling their hair, until they find our site. Google "should" have a way to aggregate these needs into a coherent search either via accumulation of multiple user searches into a single, cumulative result. Or, barring that as too difficult Google should have a way of finding sites that aggregate categories of information (and in doing so in effect creating new categories), like worldlangauge.com does, and add those sites into their top results and thus give the user a more concise as well as comprehensive response.

But try telling that to Google (and yes, we have tried for years to talk to someone at Google). We thought they would be interested to learn more about what users really want, and why and so on. But, Google is too big to care, and so I must agree with Mr. Shwartz that Google is vulnerable when users finally get fed up with not finding what they really want, and what they really want is most often to find out first what are their options. Google sucks at providing that, unless you enjoying drinking from the stream of a fire hose in your face.

I'm pleased to see more discussions regarding the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to search and discovery and the viability of vertical and niche companies.

There’s clearly room for multiple players. Unlike broad, horizontal markets, such as traditional Internet search engines, where major competitors offer the same basic service to an identical audience, vertical and niche market companies can easily differentiate themselves and successfully coexist by appealing to specific market segments.

At www.FindEventsFast.com we’re targeting the Event vertical/niche. Technically it’s not an “Internet search engine� -- it does not crawl and harvest unstructured data from other Web sites and then rely on keyword matching and/or complex algorithms in an attempt to select the most appropriate search results. Instead, we work with structured data.

Event Organizers register, are vetted, and select from established lists of Locations and Categories that pertain to their Events. Attendees select from the same lists when specifying what type of Events they're looking for.

The longer Google avoids slicing their index into truly vertical search scopes, the more chance publishers of specialty content have for creating new destinations with targeted search results and ads relevant to their audience. Google CSE and Universal both have nibbled at this but they have not embraced it. I think Microsoft is taking an aggressive approach to becoming more relevant behind the scenes as evidenced by their recent acquisition of a health vertical and some of their research papers. So while Google is easy to paint as the one to beat, vertical search has become a chink in their armor that their closest competitors are beginning to exploit. Watch out for the underdogs in this race.

A report just released by Dogpile and Infospace says that the major search engines deliver dramatically different results.

It found that on Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask the first page results overlap by less than 1% and that only 3.6% of the top ranked organic search results were the same across all search engines for any given query, down from 7.0% in July 2005.

It also found 88.3% of all results were unique to one search engine, while 8.9% were shared by two search engines, 2.2% of total results were shared by three search engines, and 0.6% of total results were shared by all four.

Also the majority of first page results were unique to one search engine, with 69.6% of Google’s first page search results were unique to Google. For Yahoo! this figure was 79.4%, 80.1% for MSN, and 75% for Ask.com.

Also paid search results also seldom overlap, only 4.6% of Yahoo! and Google sponsored links overlap for a given query. For 22.8% of all queries, Google did not return a sponsored link. whereas Yahoo! returned one or more. For 9.9% of all queries, Yahoo! did not return a sponsored link whereas Google returned one or more.

Habit is a great deadener, and if the search quality between the different engines appears so variable, what is the best search engine? Perhaps loyalty to a search engine is similar to the brand loyalty we associate with the consumer lifestyle brands like colas, cigarettes or trainers.

With the introduction of Google Universal search and Ask 3-D now integrating video , audio, maps, images as well as text results, (enabling Google and Ask to monetise video and audio via the associated advertising), but it will clutter up the results pages and will perhaps affect consumer loyalty to a search engine. Recent eyetracking studies indicate users of a search engine seldom click through to the second page of results...perhaps they will react to all this clutter like they do to intrusive interactive banner ads?

Business and professional users may also find this clutter intrusive and as time is money, they may demand that their search experience delivers the best results first and not a noisy collection of images, video, audio, maps and text.

Perhaps this represents an opportunity for specialist publishers to create vertical search services for their niche markets? UBM and Convera, for example, are creating vertical search services for the medical sector via the new www.searchmedica.com brand - and it has been reported that focus group tests with medical practioners showed that 70% preferred using SearchMedica to Google.

I think Ephraim is right on the mark. Vertical search services can produce better results through focused effort. The verticals won't produce better results in every case (e.g. "small public tech companies” apparently), but they often produce much better results and many web users are using vertical services to find information and make purchase decisions.

I have to disagree with Susan’s point in that not all verticals use ads from the big 3 search engines to monetize traffic (although most do). My company, SureHits, focuses only on the insurance & loan industries. We have our own ad sales system that allows advertisers to bid for clicks by product and state. Our model makes far more sense than keyword bidding for our industry.

founder of mylocator.com is the owner of 1200+ vertical locator domain names. claims to own the greatest strategic vertical domain portfolio network ever created. with a network like this in place it will be virtually impossible for any other multichannel vertical search engines to compete. The "king of location has taken the throne." MyLocator.com

RSSMicro with over 65 million RSS feeds, posts, and articles in its index, is the best search vertical for news and blogs. Adopting a global standard for content publishing and distribution technology (RSS Feeds), RSSMicro offers the best solution for "super dynamic" contents. Good to note that current crawling technique adopted by major search engines is a total failure when new web technologies such as AJAX are in place.

Learn more about RSSMicro search engine at: http://www.rssmicro.com/aboutus.web

As I suspected, you are being a bit deceitful. Your 68 million hits becomes 82k by simply looking for the exact phrase. Been doing searches for long?
Thats stll a lot, granted, but *several orders of magnitude better than you report!

Even without judging the quality of the results, I can still say your report is way off base.