Today we conclude our 3 part series on “What is a Search Engine?” with Part III “What is an Alternative Search Engine?”* by yours truly.

Part I: What is a Search Engine? by Nitin Karandikar (two days ago)

Part II: What is Not a Search Engine? by Kaila Colbin (yesterday)


*to be followed later today by the “Top 100 Alternative Search Engines” August Update.



What is an “alternative” search engine?

This installment, the third and final of our three part series on “What is a search engine?” is an explanation of the term ‘alternative’ as it is used a) in the monthly “Top 100 Alternative Search Engines” list and b) on my blog, AltSearchEngines.com. I say explanation and not definition, because I am using the term in the context of those two spheres only; I am not looking beyond them to any third-party definition, such as a dictionary or Wikipedia. But then, what if we did? I queried three top notch sources, and this is what I found:

1) Wikipedia – I searched for Alternative Search Engines: Result: No page with that title exists.

2) Google: Definition “Alternative Search Engine:” Result: The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines by Charles Knight.

3) Answers.com Alternative Search Engine: Top 10 Alternative Search Engines (Wendy Boswell; About.com), Top 5 Alternative Search Engines (Pandia), and, you guessed it, Top 100 Alternative Search Engines (Charles Knight).

So, for better or worse, I seem to have made a pretty solid connection between the concept of an “Alternative” Search Engine and my Top 100 list.

Aside: I am willing to also put “search engine” in quotes, because after reading Nitin’s and Kaila’s two posts, I admit that my use of the term “search engine” is the loosest and most inclusive of the three of us. To use Nitin’s analogy of a “car,” if I saw a really cool prototype of the 2008 Corvette, even though it was still in “Alpha” testing and didn’t even have an engine inside, I’d still say “Wow! check this out – this is going to be awesome when it hits the streets!” Is it a “car?” To a MotorTrend writer it probably is, but not to a car buyer. Now, “Alternative,” as I use it, means that a particular search engine is not simply 1) not one of the 5 major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, or Ask), but 2) that it has also demonstrated superiority to one of the major search engines (usually Google) in one particular aspect.

For example, ChaCha gives you the option of calling up an experienced search Guide if you need assistance with your search. The major search engines do not have that particular feature. LivePlasma shows you visually what music or movies might be similar to ones that you know you like; the majors don’t. KoolTorch can show you 50 – 100 search results on one page/screen, the others cannot, Quintura and KartOO have their 2-D map/tag cloud displays, and so on (and on).

Alternative is a Subjective term, not an Objective one (sorry).

I often receive comments telling me that _____________ search engine should be included on the Top 100 list because it has a) a great market share, b) Alexa rank, or c) superior results than some of the other ones on the list. But again, that would be comparing each ASE to an independent standard. Even if you like that approach, and many people do, it’s simply not applicable to my work. I always disclose the fact that I evaluate every one of the Top 100, and every one posted on the blog, subjectively.

I mean it the same way that a film critic might watch 200 movies and give one 5 stars and another 2 stars. The movie critic is speaking out of personal experience, and certainly not by a metric such as the amount of money a movie makes (although obviously the investors do!). I am a search engine critic, and each search engine that makes it to the Top 100 does so because it has impressed me.

Important note: What if you try one of these “Alts” and you are not impressed? No worries! Many people go to see a movie, hate it, and then grumble at the movie critic that induced them to spend $20 to go and see it. You have every right to dislike my choices!


The Top 100 Alternative User Interfaces?

The second most common comment that I get is the complaint that many of the “search engines” in the Top 100 or on the blog are simply new interfaces sitting atop a major search engine’s API, using their index; and so they aren’t really search engines at all. For me, it’s about the user’s experience. If someone searches with Quintura, for example, they may get exactly the same results as a major search engine on the “right” side of the results page, I suppose they would, but the tag cloud on the left side is far superior than the results page of those same underlying search engines. Quintura puts it this way;

“Does the (Quintura) software use its own Web index? At present, the software builds the map based on information contained in links and summaries of those links returned by a search engine. We plan to use a Web index of a search engine to allow you searching even faster for more relevant results. We also plan to have our own Web index that will be based on contextual relationships among words.”

But Quintura was just named “Search Engine of the Month,” so its fairly obvious that I consider the User Interface / user experience very significant, even if the engine in question has not had the time or resources to crawl the web and build their own index yet. After all, would you really insist that a small search engine build an index comparable to Google’s for oh, say, a zillion dollars before you were willing to accept their mind blowing, patent pending interface, perched on top of a legitimate index, as an “alternative search engine” in it’s own right? Applying that standard, we would simply have no Alts at all.

Out with the old, in with the new. (Or, “why don’t you have Dogpile on the List?”)

Let’s look at the Monthly winners to date: GoshMe, KoolTorch, AfterVote, Quintura, KartOO, dialog.us, and “?” this month. Some of them did not even exist a year ago. One of my goals is to show my readers the “latest and the greatest” search engine innovations. The motto for the blog, after all, is “the most wonderful search engines you’ve never seen,” and my favorite comment of all is, “Wow! I didn’t even know that most of these existed!” This is not bias, it’s a goal. Coming out and saying, “hey, here’s one called Dogpile – check it out!” just doesn’t work. Everyone probably has checked it out, and a long time ago. But how many readers had seen KoolTorch or dialog.us before they hit the #1 spot? It’s like the old Top 40 pop songs, the overnight sensations that soared to the top of the music charts. Unfortunately for Dogpile, Meta Search engines have come a long way since it was introduced; it is simply an old friend to a lot of people (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

And speaking of familiar, 95-98% of all searches have chosen to use the major search engines! Why even write about the Top 100 of a 2-5% slice of the whole pie? How can a blog succeed when practically all of the searchers out there don’t even use its “products?” As Seinfeld would say, “who do these Alts think they are ? Now those are questions we should be talking about! Some of them believe that they posses a unique approach, an alternative approach; one that will allow them to steadily increase their market share to the detriment of the major search engines. Many alternative search engines want to dominate their particular Vertical and become the “Best of Breed,” so to speak! The best MP3 search, Blog search, Video, RSS, People, Job, Health, ad infinitum….

Still others having developed a totally new technology, and hope to sell it to a major search engine or corporation. Of course this would impoverish the Alts and likely enrich the majors, and that’s a problem that will have to be addressed (and its their right).

Well, I would like to leave you with this; in a few hours I will post the August 2007 version of “The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines” right here on AltSearchEngines. It will include, of course, the Search Engine of the Month! Look it over; try a few of them – there are 10 Honorable Mentions.

Consider what Nitin said and ask yourself, “are these all search engines?” Would Kaila say that any of them (Quintura?) are not search engines? And do you think that they exceed the expectations set by the major search engines, as I would argue?

Please think these things over and leave a comment here; we appreciate every one!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 8:46 am and is filed under Guest Authors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.