One of the theories discussed at the Alt Search Engines meeting was that the competition for Search Engines might not just be in different, faster or better search engines but in alternative ways of finding information.
The AllTh.at team
One example is Smart Agents like AllTh.at and Google Alerts. Lots of people use Google Alerts to keep them up-to-date of new information. AllTh.at saves your searches and keeps looking for new results and notifies you via email or RSS. Previously users might have used search engines to find new information. Now there is a continuously updating search query active in the background that notifies us of new results.
Services such as Symbaloo and Netvibes make it easier to manage lots of information. This makes it easier to browse the web and find stuff. For a lot of people Google is THE portal to the web. They don’t use bookmarks or even URLs but simply open a browser, wait for Google to appear and type in what they need. As portal services (like Symbaloo) gain traction people will be less inclined to use Google to navigate the web.
What are the alternatives to Google?
A third example are the vertical search engines. You can use Google to search for words but it is more logical to use a dedicated dictionary search engine like Answers.com and a car search engine like UsedCars.com. The vertical search engines are becoming more popular every day and more verticals appear left and right.
Can you think of more ways to get to information without using Google? WikiPedia is a good alternative to Google is you are looking for specific information. What other alternatives are there?
I really believe in providing people the tools to make their search queries persistent, i.e. that they receive relevant results every new day (or every one or two hours but only during office hours, which is an option we provide in our software that is used a lot!).
We see this everyday: people search with Google or use Google Alerts for new information about specific subjects but aren’t really satisfied with the results (Google Alerts is notorious for providing bad, unpredictable results). We as Infovester with our online offerings LegalAlert, FinancialAlert, ComplianceAlert etc and for instance a company like Filtrbox provide another experience: you get all the relevant info in a timely manner by adding persistant search queries, and are provided with several options to filters, sort and index your results (and get delivered them to you online, via RSS, e-mail, IM, to your intranet or any other way you’d want your information to be delivered).
We’re not really competing head-to-head with Google in this in my opinion, we think we offer a complementary service. But our customers do compare the two on the ability to gather information and are looking for new ways to gather timely information compared to their experience with Google and other search engines (like for instance the search engines provided by large legal publishers here in Holland, which also go the Google route in delivering information).
This summary is very valid. However, you’re missing one very important scenario: the enterprise setting.
There, you can leverage knowledge from expert colleagues by using the new trend of Enterprise Social Search ; relevance is brought by your company’s expertise, captured into its social network. Hence results that may be smarter than e.g. ‘plain’ Google search. See http://www.enterprisesocialsearch.com
Post sponsored by Symbaloo? :)
http://www.Bunchle.com allows users to search multiple search engines at once and using their tabs to switch between results. I find their web, image and blog search the most useful. If none of the default fits, you can register and create your own category and search engine tabs.
Don’t seem to be any competitions for any search engines, but I guess is a much easier way to search.
I agree that sometimes vertical search engines are better option for searching then Google or Yahoo, but this helps only if those vertical search engines are popular and they have a lot of visitors, and i thing vertical search engines are used only by surfers who knows something more about web.
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