The past few Sundays I have written about my increasing frustration with the plight of the Alternative Search Engines, which I would caption, “Too Many Choices and Too Little Market Share.” Just to browse the recent Top 100 Alternative Search Engines list, spending only 10 minutes at each one, would take you 16 hours! I seriously doubt that many readers are doing that.

The result? If you take all 100 of the search engines on my list, and combine all of their market shares, the grand total would be less than 5% of the Search market share for 100 of the very best alternative search engines combined! For a precise market share analysis, please visit Tynto! the Long Tail Search Engine.

In my last article, I mentioned that AltSearchEngines has begun to formulate our own solution to this apparent impasse; this Plexiglas ceiling. But in my private emails with some of you, I am also realizing that there are probably other solutions besides mine (imagine that!).

So, with all of that in mind, here are the rules of the competition:

1) Every contributor must assume, just for the sake of argument, that the 5 major search engines have a current 95% of the search market thus: Google 50%; Yahoo! 25%; MSN 10%; AOL 5%; ASK 5%.

2) Just for the sake of this competition, assume that the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines posted on ASE on August 1st are the only other search engines in existence (even if you differ with my choices).

3) Assume that you can tell the alt search engines to do anything: remain separate, merge in any combination, utilize a new interface, allocate their resources in a particular way, move in any particular direction (e.g. Vertical Search, Personalization, Semantic Search) and so on.

4) You may not tell the major search engines what to do, e.g. merge. You must assume that they will behave consistent with their behavior in 2007. Of course if Google’s recent behavior has been to buy an average of two companies a week, then you can posit that.

5) Each essay will be judged on the advice that you would give to the 100 alternative search engines in order for them to break past that 5% barrier (combined) and get to, say, 7%; thereby passing (combined), just in theory now; AOL, and ASK (at 5% each).

We will accept Don Dodge’s estimate that each 1% of search market share is worth roughly $1 billion, so if you get the Alts to 7%, we will conclude that you are now a Billionaire, having created more than 2 Billion dollars in market value.

Please email your essays as attachments to Charles@ReadWriteWeb.com anytime between Monday August 6th and Sunday August 12th. Please specify how you want your bio to read, and what link to use back to you. Essay length is up to you.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 5th, 2007 at 2:39 pm and is filed under Alts, News. 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.