OntoSearch

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

The English language market for search is dominated by a few big behemoths. According to 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%), followed by MapQuest, eBay, craigslist, Fox, MySpace, Facebook and Amazon.

With the search market valued at 0 Billion that makes every single 1% worth Billion when selling the company and you would do very well by conquering just a 0.1% slice of that cake. The number of start up search engines is only going to increase with more venture capital wanting a piece of the market.

This is the top 7 search engines that the 2010 blog headlines are likely to gossip around. New or old, they all have in common that they deliver good search results and they have been innovating in 2009.

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 really good 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 uses a combination of Yahoo BOSS, Wikipedia and it’s own crawler DuckDuckBot to give you both hard information in a Zero-click information box, categories to further refine searches and the actual search results.

Founded by Gabriel Weinberg, who started and then sold The Names Database, DuckDuckGo is a private venture that has grown steadily since it launched in September 2008. Watch out for this search engine in 2010, it has a nice niche carved out for itself

Spezify

A totally cool search engine, Spezify. The search results are showcased as images and newspaper clippings pasted all over the computer screen, the clippings having one paragraph quotes from the result web site. By scanning some of the clippings you get a excellent overview of the matter 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 search engine ranks sites differently than the big mainstream search engines. As Google gives priority to aged and big sites, many new, small and relevant sites are hard to find in their search results. The algorithm of Secret Search Engine Labs ranks sites according to on page factors and link anchor text and removes spam pages using the trademarked CashRank method.

A search engine that puts more weight on web page content than on site authority and that provides useful info 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 slowly into the best search engine on the Web.

Bing

First there was MSN Search, then Live Search and now with the latest re-branding we have Bing. With a forceful marketing campaign Microsoft has managed to grab almost 10% of the market for search. The media attention during the re-launch has fueled innovation adding new features like the daily changing background image, suggested topics and trends.

With Microsoft working fiercely to increase Bing’s market share you should watch them closely during 2010.

Blekko

This is a brand new start-up that is keeps it’s mouth shut almost as well as Old Google when you ask about the what and the when of their new search engine. The strong management team with ex-employees from Topix, Google, AOL and Netscape Search has me wondering if they have something fascinating going on.

We are still waiting eagerly  for Blekkos public launch. It was promised for 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 classic search engine but a real-time Twitter search where you can monitor several keywords and see the tweets containing those keywords in real time as they are tweeted. When you need to monitor you niche or area of expertise or if you just want to track the conversation this is a neat tool.

There Are More Search Engines, Right?

I think you know that Google is innovating and it’s pretty sure they will make some noise in 2010. Wolfram Alpha is fascinating as it is the only major search engine that makes the results from data.

There’s a multitude of social, real-time or just weird search engines starting up and there’s no telling if one of them develops into the next Twitter and makes a permanent mark in the search market. You’ll find more information about these and many more at AltSearchengines.com

There is finally signs that we could see big changes in the search engine landscape after years of rule by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. There’s new technology sprouting like mushrooms in every nook of the Net. There’s semantic search, visual presentation, real time search and socially powered search engines created. If nothing else is achieved at least the old behemoths will have to adopt the new technology to stay competitive, giving us better search results in the process.