Written by Richard Martin.

With a single dominant player, the Web search market hasn’t exactly been fertile ground for startups and emerging companies with innovative new technologies. But a flurry of venture capital investment, product development, acquisitions, and other industry activity seems to mark the beginning of a new era in search, one in which specialists play a bigger role.

Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) handles 62 percent of Web search queries, followed by Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), according to research firm Nielsen Online . Behind them is a proliferation of upstarts, promising nuanced forms of consumer-oriented Web searches, arcane new “semantic Web” and contextual search services, mobile search, and search results in other guises, such as NewsGator feeds.

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Tags: Hakia, Silobreaker, Surfcanyon, SearchMe, Ask.com, Viewzi, Cuil.

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