At the beginning of every month, we update our list of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines. How so? The two essential steps are to remove any search engines that are not currently (or permanently) active, and then to add any winners from the time of the last update. Rarely does that process yield exactly 100 engines, so some editorial tweaking must be done. That’s just a necessary part of the process. Finally, I review the new list, and select the one alternative search engine that I think deserves to be named the Search Engine of the Month. In December, the Top 10 Search Engines of the Month will square off to be named the Search Engine of the Year.

Looking over the list from last month to this month, one trend that I have noticed is a change in the vertical of Job Search engines. From keyword based engines such as Recruit.net, Indeed, and SimplyHired, we now have more advanced engines such as itzbig and Jobfox.

Another trend that can be seen in this past month is that with “The Rise of the Vertical Search Engines,” the number of choices has become cumbersome. In the Health Search engine category particularly, there are dozens to chose from, and many address different audiences (consumers vs. health care professionals), so selecting the “top” ones can be quite a challenge.

And finally, an editorial comment. In my line of work, you can imagine that a lot of new search engines contact me to demo their project and get some feedback. Whenever I do, I always seek to relate what they are doing with what similar alternative search engines are doing, and so I will say, “How is that different from Omgili?” or “Have you seen the way result are done on RedZee?”

Well, long story short, too often I find out that they are not familiar with the search engines that I’m naming, even though they are invariably Top 100 engines. In fact, I only know of (there may be others) one search engine CEO that has checked out every single search engine ever mentioned on AltSearchEngines – Mark Cramer of SurfCanyon. At the very least, I would encourage anyone building a search engine to review the latest Top 100 list. At 10 minutes each that takes 16 hours, but for a startup whiz kid that’s only one day.

And now for the Search Engine of the Month, it’s ChaCha. ChaCha was the Search Engine of the Year for 2006 because at the time they were the only “Alt” that would answer any question that you submitted – by a human guide, and for free. That didn’t change much in 2007, but in January ChaCha announced their mobile phone text service. Just text ChaCha at 242 242 (Cha Cha) and you can still ask any question you want, and a human guide will text back an answer (your carrier may charge you for the text, it depends on your plan) right to your phone. Call me crazy, but I think getting a human search assistant from your computer or your cell phone is one type of search that’s hard to beat!

Editor’s note: AskMeNow, also a Top 100 Alt, offers just the mobile service, so they get the Silver Medal – why not compare the two and leave a comment?

The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines, February 2008 (.pdf)

The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines, February 2008 (.xls)

This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 5:40 pm and is filed under Alts, Top 100. 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.