ReadWriteWeb

Written by Charles S. Knight, SEO and edited by Richard MacManus. The original version of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines List appeared here on Read/WriteWeb on January 29, 2007. Every month, we'll be updating the list and selecting a "Search Engine of the Month". At the end of the year, we'll also select an Alternative Search Engine of the Year.

In February's edition of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines list, there are 32 new search engines (and of course 32 dropped out to accommodate them). You'll find the updated list, in HTML and Excel formats, at the bottom of this article. A lot can happen in a month in the ever-changing world of Search, so accompanying the list is my commentary on the changes during February.

Criteria for inclusion in Top 100

Firstly, let's explain how we developed the list. When we say "The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines," we are referring to alternatives to Google. Many readers wrote in to ask what the criteria was for inclusion on the List, such as: is it the percentage of market share, or some other statistical measure? It is not. The criteria is twofold: 

1) the Search Engine should exhibit superiority to Google - not as a whole, but in just one particular area. People have been talking about Wikipedia's search engine Wikiasari or even digg as potential "Google killers". That's fine, but we are not arguing that any one of the 100 list members is a "Google killer". Rather, that they should be matched against the appropriate corresponding part of Google. For example, TheFind is a shopping search engine and therefore should be compared to Google's shopping search engine, Froogle. blinkx, a video search engine, should be matched against Google's video search feature, and so forth. (See article #1 for a fuller explanation of these categories.) 

2) Secondly, what ultimately gets a particular search engine into the Top 100 (as opposed to the hundreds and hundreds of "also rans") is my evaluation. It is a subjective, personal judgment from an SEO - not an independent, statistical measure. I liken it to a movie critic, who must be ready to defend his/her ratings, but the reader is by no means obligated to agree with them after having seen the movie. 

Finally, there is no ranking within the Top 100, which is why it is displayed alphabetically from A-Z. However, starting this month, one of the 100 will be picked and featured as the "Search Engine of the Month."

Written by Sramana Mitra

I have written several pieces recently about the Extended Enterprise trend, covering Segments such as Collaboration, CRM and PLM.

In the same vein, that I have proposed a framework for Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS), I would like to discuss in this piece, a framework for Enterprise 3.0.

Fot those working with web technologies, and focused on business applications, the trend to watch carefully is the Extended Enterprise one, which hasn’t quite become mainstream yet.

Written by Rudy De Waele and edited by Richard MacManus. Note: this is a Mobile Web focused excerpt from Rudy's complete wrapup of the 3GSM World Congress, held recently in Barcelona.

One of the things I realized during the MobileMonday Global Peer Awards is the increasing globalization of innovation. Innovation is happening everywhere and a lot of start-up companies are working in the mobile web area; while still in its very early stage, the mobilisation of the web is happening.

Google vice-president and chief Internet evangelist Vinton G. Cerf - also one of the founding fathers of the Internet - predicted Tuesday that mobile phones, not personal computers, will fuel the growth of the worldwide Web, as countries like India snap up millions of handsets monthly.

The mobilisation of the web was an important part of the discussions during 3GSM. Mike Rowehl and Carlo Longino wrote on this already; also read Michael Mace's interesting take on this subject.

The content hall (Hall 7) of the exhibition was filled with a lot of mobile adult (Sign ‘O’ the Times?) and web companies resolutely going mobile including Yahoo. Shozu won for the 2nd time in a row the prize for Most Innovative Mobile Application or Content Award with its Mobile MultiMedia Delivery Platform. To me Shozu is one of the truly real great mobile integrated applications, but isn’t this a sign that no other great innovative applications are around, or haven’t been noticed by the organizers, or maybe have not been found worthy or mature to market yet?

I'm participating in the Radar Relay, a group blogging effort being run by Under The Radar in preparation for the upcoming Office 2.0 event on March 23 in Silicon Valley (I will be a judge at the conference). So in this post I’ll be highlighting some of the office 2.0 news that came out this week.

The big news of course was Google releasing a Premier Edition of its Google Apps suite of office tools. The new-look suite includes the existing Google Apps tools - Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Page Creator and Start Page – plus Google Docs & Spreadsheets, a set of APIs and third party services, and a solid support and hosting package. We covered this on Read/WriteWeb, noting that it still falls short of a full office suite – missing is presentations, CRM, JotSpot(!) and other things. Also lacking is full integration and collaboration between the apps, a la Basecamp or Central Desktop. So Google Apps is a step forward, but by no means the final deal.

Feedburner has released an interesting new report on web-based RSS Readers, prompted by the recent introduction of Google Reader into its stats (incidentally, for some reason R/WW only increased by around 20% after Google Reader was added to Feedburner; whereas most other tech sites increased by 40+%).

RSS Analytics plagued by unreliable stats

Feedburner is putting a lot of effort into enhancing the way it measures RSS feeds. I was talking to someone the other day about how RSS analytics is still very much a nascent industry - i.e. it's even more difficult to get reliable feed reader stats than it is to get reliable webpage stats (and I've written before about how easy it is to manipulate both). Feedburner itself points out one of my particular bugbears at the moment - how being a default feed in an RSS Reader like Netvibes or Pageflakes artificially increases your RSS subscriber number (in some cases by a large amount). R/WW has benefited from this behavior too, as we are a default feed in the bundles that Rojo provides. But alas, we're not a default feed on the other popular RSS Readers and startpages :-( Anyway, all of these things mean that a blog's RSS subscriber number should be taken with more than a few grains of salt.

Feedburner focuses on Audience Engagement

Despite all these issues with RSS analytics, Feedburner is leading the way in feed management for consumers and in this new report they discuss some new measurements - focused on how people are reading feeds and interacting (i.e. clicking or 'viewing') with them. They call this "Audience engagement" and it seems to be a priority now for Feedburner, in order to counter the issues with straight subscriber counts (e.g. the default feed issue discussed above). For the record, I think this new focus on audience engagement makes perfect sense for Feedburner - as it will help move RSS analytics forward and remove some of the stigma attached to it, due to the current unreliability over RSS subscriber counts.

Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus

Music makes us happy. So happy in fact that we shake, smile and fork off billions of dollars every year on it. So it is not an accident that music is one of the most popular forms of media online.

Because the music market is large, there is an opportunity for innovation. We have recently seen a lot of new services such as Last.fm and Pandora jumping into the music market to compete with iTunes and more traditional music sites. In this post, we will discuss another newcomer - a mashup between a desktop music player and a web browser called Songbird.

Songbird at a glance

Songbird is really just that - a mixture of a music player and the web browser. Built on top of the open-source Mozilla code base, this desktop application lets you manage your local music collection, search for new music online as well as instantly play any music on blogs and web sites.

You maybe thinking: So what? Why mix a music player and a web browser? We already have great applications that play music and let us browse the web. While this is true, we think there are good reasons to mash them up, particularly for music and perhaps for other things as well. The thing is: Songbird really understands music, understands the web and understands what people want to do with music on the web.

Written by Charles S. Knight, SEO and edited by Richard MacManus

Last week I saw the following ad in Radio Shack for the Kronus 55 Piece Home Repair Tool Set:

Molded case (1) 
Bits (20) 
Bit holder (2) 
Claw hammer (1) 
Level (1) 
Pliers (1) 
Wire stripper (1) 
Long nose pliers (1) 
Utility knife (1) 
Wrench (1) 
Hex keys (sae & metric) (18) 
Hex key holder (1) 
Tape measure (1) 
Ratchet (1) 
Screwdrivers (4)

All for just $29.99!

As I was reaching for my credit card, the thought occurred to me: why not offer a 55 Piece Mobile Search Tool Kit... and not for $29.99, but for free!

The Mobile Search field is going to be "huge", but right now it's growing in fits and starts. So for the early adopters amongst us, a tool kit will come in handy. Here then is my 55 piece tool kit for mobile search:

Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus

Understanding your audience is the key to success in any business - including blogging. Lately the Read/WriteWeb authors have been discussing what it is that keeps readers coming back here. Our recent poll indicated that most of you come back to this blog for Analysis and Reviews. We are thrilled to hear this, because we focus a lot on those two things.

But the poll results got us wondering about which posts in particular are the most popular? And we're not talking about simple page views - we want to know what content you actually liked. In the web 1.0 world, understanding what people liked was a voodoo science. Luckily, in these days of blogs and social software, there are fairly definitive ways of measuring what people like. Comments on posts, del.icio.us bookmarks, Technorati links and of course Diggs, are all entries into the fascinating world of social popularity. So we decided to put our investigative hat on and do a deep dive on Read/WriteWeb popular posts.

Read/WriteWeb comments

The obvious place to look for popular posts is in the Read/WriteWeb archives. We looked for the most commented-on posts. Below are the posts that had at least 50 comments:

Written by Sramana Mitra

I have written a few pieces already addressing the disjointed nature of the web, whereby, you go one place for content, another for community, and a third for commerce, the most notable of these is the popular, 4C: Yahoo’s Turnaround Formula.

Let’s quickly recap the terminology:

3C = Content, Commerce, Community | 4th C = Context | P = Personalization | VS = Vertical Search

This, I submit, is the formula for the future: Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS).

Web 2.0 has been a nichy phenomenon with hundred and thousands of microcap efforts addressing one of the Cs, lately, Community being the most popular force, producing companies like MySpace, Facebook, Piczo, Xanga, and Flixster.

In Web 1.0, Commerce had been the driving force, that produced companies like Netflix, BlueNile, Amazon, and eBAY. It had also resulted in the Dotcom meltdown.

The same period that is seeing the surge of Web 2.0, has also seen a great deal of investment in Vertical Search, like Sidestep for Travel.

Personalization has remained limited to some unsatisfactory efforts by the MyYahoo team, their primary disadvantage being the lack of a starting Context. More recently, Netvibes has raised a lot of buzz, but also lacks the same organizing principle: Context.

In Web 3.0, I predict, we are going to start seeing roll-ups. We will see a trunk that emerges from the Context, be it film (Netflix), music (iTunes), cooking / food, working women, single parents, … and assembles the Web 3.0 formula that addresses the whole set of needs of a consumer in that Context.

Written by Jitendra Gupta of Karmaweb and edited by Richard MacManus

Bill Gates of Microsoft just announced a deal with Jan Rain, VeriSign and Sxip to develop integration between Microsoft CardSpace and the open source project, OpenID. This is an interesting deal between the software giant in Redmond and a popular open source project, which deservers a closer look. For those already familiar with OpenID and Microsoft, jump directly to the takeaway section. For others, the next two sections will provide you with a quick introduction to two new technologies that will likely have a significant impact on the future of Internet.

What is OpenID

OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. It is aimed at solving the problem of Web single sign-on. How does the problem of web single sign-on affect you? Well, if you struggle with keeping track of different usernames and passwords at different websites where you have an account, OpenID can help you. With OpenID you will be assigned a standard username (typically a URL or an i-name, similar to an email address) that you can use on all sites that support OpenID.