I'm at the Alternative Search Engines Day, in San Francisco, an event put on by our network blog AltSearchEngines. We started out with a keynote talk by ASE editor Charles Knight, who noted that alternative search engines only have about 1.7% market share combined. He thinks this is too small, so he wants all of the "alts" - you can see a list of them on our subsite The Search Race - to band together to make a bigger impact on the search market.
Charles discussed current aggregation approaches such as Sputtr, which puts multiple search engines onto one page (see screenshot below), but he also outlined a vision for a Virtual World for alt search engines.
Sputtr
Charles pointed out that although Sputtr is a great app, it is difficult for mainstream users to grok. For one thing ordinary users won't know how to make sense of all the logos. Also people outside the tech industry will not know many of the brands of the smaller search companies. So Charles suggested that a virtual world approach could be the answer, whereby different alt search engines are represented in a 3D world according to the type of search they provide. For example if you are looking for a job, then there will be a virtual representation of this in the 3D world and a number of job search engines available to meet that need.
This "federated search" approach, as someone in the audience termed it, is one way for the hundreds of small search startups to increase their overall market share. Another approach is to create a common platform for alts, using APIs and UI standards (suggested over lunch to me by Morgan Snyder from allth.at).
Also on the opening discussion panel were myself, Nitin Karandikar from The Software Abstractions Blog, and Henrick Kac from BlogDimension. Nitin recently wrote a post entitled Cooperation of Alt Search Engines: A Manifesto (original here), which outlined 5 possibilities for alts to cooperate - e.g. "Search Federations of complementary ASEs".
Opening panel, photo by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten
The overarching theme to AltSearchEngines Day is to encourage the alts to band together and help each other reach the mainstream audience. Anyone who regularly reads AltSearchEngines will know that there is a ton of innovation in search, literally hundreds of niche and vertical search startups. So this effort to join together to compete with (or complement) the likes of Google and Microsoft is very commendable - and as I mentioned in the panel, ReadWriteWeb heartily supports it.
Special thanks to Charles Knight for the vision and pulling this day together, and also LA Lassek and the SeeqPod team for organizing the event. Thanks as well to the sponsors of this event: SeeqPod, UpTake, HealthPricer, MatchPoint, GoPubMed, BlogDimension.
When I was doing the intros at the start, I noted that Charles is "the voice of alternative search engines" in this industry. He really is galvinising and leading the alts forward as a group. Be sure to subscribe to AltSearchEngines to track this initiative.
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Alternative Search Engines Day - Call For Alts to Band Together.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/3807
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all Read/WriteWeb posts
This is a good thing to hear, that there are some people who want to rival the search engine giants, but... will this be possible?
Posted by: Alex B. | April 21, 2008 4:05 PMI think they can make an impact on the search market, but only if they join together. That was Charles' main point. But I should also mention that many of the alts want to complement the big guns and not compete with them.
Posted by: Richard MacManusThanks for the informative and inspiring day. We've covered quite a lot on our The Next Web blog. 6 articles with live blogging and interviews. See: http://thenextweb.org/tag/altsearchengines
Cheers
Posted by: Ernst-Jan Pfauth | April 21, 2008 5:22 PMproblem most alt engines have is a horrible domain name that is not strategic keyphrase toplevel or niche. No one would ever find them through direct navigation. What good is a alt engine for efficiency if you have to teach users what the domain means. Location is the holy grail to all online endeavors. mylocator.com attempts to address these location issues with a 1300 multichannel strategic vertical locator domain network. The alt network is a good idea and would be most efficienct if all the network sites are displayed in a uniform manner. layout, design, basic format. A family layout network of alt destinations.
Posted by: Steven Emery | April 21, 2008 8:21 PMIs it really necessary that the "alts" band together? Is it possible that while somewhat innovative they are not "better enough" than what's available or are not attacking pain points that people care sufficiently about? I'm not trying to be a naysayer as it's great to see companies thinking out-of-the-box and trying new things, but this doesn't mean they should succeed for such. Think about the apps that have caught your imagination or your fancy...was it because of their name (or the meaning behind this)? Was it because what they did was innovative? Or was it simply because they solved a particular problem for which no adequate solution existed prior to this?
While I enjoy trying out many of these new search engines, I find that way too many of them are not really solving anything "better enough" than the alternatives available to us today.
I hope this dissenting view doesn't come across as hurtful since that's not my intent, just throwing out the idea that most of "alts" aren't there yet w/an innovation that challenges the status quo. Or at least overcomes our laziness to learn a new way of doing things ;)
Posted by: p-airAm I the only one who stumbled over the 3d bit? How would alt search become more accessible to the main stream through a virtual world?
Posted by: alex | April 22, 2008 2:05 AMpeople are definitely lazy when it comes to learning something new. network incentives could be used to bring users to register at the alt network.
Posted by: Steven Emery | April 22, 2008 1:47 PMRichard,
Kudos to Charles for organizing this and getting some very exciting but lesser known thinkers together to discuss the future of search.
We'll be blogging a summary of the event and will post more on our blog at http://www.uptake.com/blog as soon as we can.
For now, here are the photos I took of the event. If I mistagged or failed to tag people, please comment and I will fix the photos.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/elliottng/sets/72157604693728071/
Posted by: Elliott Ng | April 23, 2008 7:36 AM