This week’s edition of Newsweek.com has an article entitled “Searching for the Best Engine” by David H. Freedman.  Here are some select quotes from it:

“Charles Knight, an analyst who runs the AltSearchEngines Web site, notes there’s a plethora of good ideas for what a third-generation engine might bring to the party, and no shortage of companies trying to prove those ideas. ‘Each has shown they can do some aspect of a search better than Google can,’ says Knight.”

“Knight tracks no fewer than 1,000 search contenders, mostly U.S.-based, that have something to recommend them.”  “Right now all these underdog search engines (except Ask.com, the No. 4 search site) have a combined share of less than 5 percent of all queries, according to Knight. But even if one or more of them starts to gain traction, does Google really have to worry about being bested by some obscure search engine, given its longstanding, widespread popularity?”

So, why was AltSearchEngines interviewed for this high-profile article?  I think here’s why:

Practically every day since we started on June 1st, AltSearchEngines has featured a “Search Engine of the Day.”  So by now, a faithful reader would have seen about 150 different alternative search engines.  But that’s not all…

Monday’s we cover Verticals, and most of these have been ”The Top 10 Blog Search engines,” etc.

Tuesdays we host debates between 2 or 3 alt search engines.

Wednesdays we get authoritative reports from search engine CEOs.

Thursdays we have welcomed a great variety of guest authors. 

Fridays we have special features, like our Stealth reports that show you the search engines that have not even fully launched yet.

Saturdays we have literally travelled the world collecting international search engines, thanks to our ever-increasing army of volunteers. (God bless them!)

(Sundays you have had to endure whatever is in my head that week I’m afraid.)

Is that it?  As Marisa Tomei would say <My Cousin Vinny> “No, there’s more!”

The 1st of every month, we have presented our Top 100 Alternative Search Engines.  But it’s not really 100, it’s 100 out of the over 1,000 that might have been on the list!

Then there are the features like yesterday, where we shared the obvious fact that we engulf every other list of search engines that we find on the Internet.

But there’s still more.  Every morning I check our “traps” of Alerts and RSS feeds to see if there is a search engine that we might have missed.  Right now I have 73 email alerts to check (and then my Netvibes feeds).  If I find a totally new search engine to post, that’s a good day.

Our network is so thorough that the other day I wrote to a new search engine for more information – and shocked them.  They were not even in private Alpha.  They were just testing their secret project for a few minutes and our traps caught a screen shot!  Suffice it to say that you’ll hear about them here.

Finally, we get many, many new leads from you, the readers, in the post comments and the general feedback comments – we investigate each and every one, even if we do not post on it. (We try to.)

But there’s more to this game than just who has the most search engines (we do).  As I learned at the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) conference that I blogged about a few weeks ago, many blogs use the principles of SEO and SEM to attract “link love” and traffic to their blogs, such as endless posts about Mahalo and Powerset and what the major search engines did today, in part, in order to raise their stats and justify higher ad rates.  Now, it is obviously not a crime to run a blog to produce income.  I do.

But at AltSearchEngines, we seek incoming links and new readers so that they will see what we want to show them - “the best search engines you’ve never seen.”  In other words, we don’t post about “popular” search engines to attract readers – - we attract readers so that we can show them the alternatives to those “popular” search engines.  See the difference?  It’s very important.

How do we get by?  Well, everyone can see that – some Alts are in a position to support our approach financially – Quintura, Hakia, PeekYou, and Kosmix, as well as earlier sponsors and those to come.  They literally keep the lights on, and we are grateful.  Oh, have you tried our new Job Board?

So, when David Freedman looked around for the best place to learn about the potential that the Alternative Search Engines have to take market share away from the major search engines, I think that’s why he called – and quoted – this blog, AltSearchEngines.  What do you think?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 6:04 pm 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.