The winner of the 2008 AltSearchEngines Search Race is Targeted Discovery search engine iSEEK!

The Race began at the start of 2008 with 100 entrants, and during the year the field grew to over 250 search engines as readers submitted their favorites.  You can see all 250 here. It’s a list that you might want to copy.

In addition to adding their favorite search engines, readers also voted for their favorites.  The winner was not picked by us, it was the readers who cast the votes, and iSEEK came in first with 123 votes.

So what is iSEEK, the winner? Here’s some good background from their site:

Their Mission: The world isn’t flat, and the web isn’t either. So why is your search?

At Vantage Labs, we wanted to use our advanced linguistic, conceptual, and AI technologies to make web search better – more relevant, direct, productive, and intelligent. But what we built isn’t just a search engine at all. By making “web searches” more intelligent and intuitive, we left “searching” behind… and now offer you Targeted Discovery, the new era of information retrieval on the web.

Why use iSEEK and Targeted Discovery?
Target Information You Want with Relevant iViews and Results. Through our iView technology, you can dynamically and instantly target results that are relevant to you. iSEEK analyzes your search results each time you do a query, identifying themes, topics, and more and organizing your results for you. Rather than wading through a mini-web of thousands of results, one by one, in some indiscernible order, you are guided to a specific set of relevant results with iViews.

Discover New and Useful Information with Intelligent iViews and Results.
iSEEK brings results to life, letting them tell you what they are about. Analyzing every set of results on-the-fly, iViews draw out topics, people, places, dates, and more from your results. You discover new facts and connections before even clicking a link.

Make Searching Simpler with Natural Language Queries.
In iSEEK, you can use natural language to do your searches. Instead of relying on keyword pattern matching and algorithms, iSEEK knows the meaning and concepts embedded in the questions you ask, so it understands what you are asking and retrieves relevant information. No more strategically selecting keywords then adding to them, revising them, and requerying them to get the results you want – simply ask questions

Easily Target Authoritative Results for your Professional or Personal Needs.
With iSEEK Searchblades, you can cut through the riffraff when you are seeking high-quality, focused results. iSEEK’s expanding selection of Searchblades enables you to search within a professional field or domain of knowledge to find information that is reputable and authoritative in that area of expertise. More than mere collections of hand-picked sites, Searchblades identify and search through relevant, trustworthy sources to bring you results that matter.

The other Top 10 winners include ChaCha, Exalead, HealthPricer, Kosmix, Searchii, Jixperts, and TWERQ.

Congratulations to everyone who participated!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 18th, 2009 at 4:00 pm and is filed under News, 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.