California Home to Quarter of Top 100 Alt Search Engines
The Library House blog has done a geographic analysis of Charles Knight's Top 100 Alternative Search Engines list. After a bit of Web research, Library House was able to find out where 94 of the 100 search engines in our list are located. The result is that the US, and California in particular, is the place to be to develop a ground-breaking search engine - with 25 of the 94 search engines coming from California. Perhaps unsurprising, but it does prove that Silicon Valley is still the center of search engine innovation at least.
Library House came up with this very nice tag cloud, showing the results:
All up, there are 17 countries and 15 US states represented in the list. France and the UK are the next best represented countries, with 7 and 6 alt search engines respectively.
I wonder if Library House would let us know the 6 search engines they couldn't locate, as I'm sure the 'wisdom of crowds' can figure their locations out (i.e. in the comments here).
On the topic of alt search engine list mashups, Don Dodge also wrote a great post attempting to categorize the list. If anyone knows of other ways to mashup the list, let us know - don't forget there's also an excel spreadsheet version available.
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Wow. Surprising to see that a Silicon Valley blog has a majority of Silicon Valley companies in their list! Geez...
Alberta, Quebec and British Columbia are Canadian provinces.
I'm surprised California doesn't have more. Also, it would be better if the alt search engines could be ranked by useage, I bet CA would hold the at least the top 25 percent...
It's a statistic with little meaning (no info about the actual usage), but nontheless an interesting one. I wouldn't have expected France or Germany up there for example.
This doesn't state anything else than the fact that the majority of search engines from a list compiled by an English speaking author living in the USA is based in the USA or in English speaking countries. Had it been written by someone from Japan, China, Russia ... (or by more authors from around the world), the list and the geographic analysis would look different.
Retal, Karbon - I agree it's not surprising that California has the majority, but the diversity of other locations is worth highlighting. There is a lot of innovation happening in Europe and every other continent and that doesn't always get attention. I suspect that as Charles repeats his "Top 100" every month we'll see an increased presence by foreign countries.
Markus - we intentionally separated US states and Canadian provinces to provide more granular perspective. We've used that in ranking VC activity globally and it allows for more insightful comparison.
As for the remaining 6 companies that we couldn't locate, I'll post them here first thing tomorrow.
Glad to see France in second position, though I am not surprised by California's ranking. The problem with French people (and I am one of them) is that while being good at innovating, they still lack the ability to sell things abroad.
I guess the powerful position of the US compared to the rest of the world comes from the quantity (diversity?). More chances to get the right one among the 25 solutions they built.
But, if you look at Europe as a single entity, sum up all the EU countries in that list and you get a stunning ... 26.
Is Europe just about to be competitive?
Wait a minute. If I do the same with all US states ... it's 50.
:(
re comment #1, this isn't a silicon valley blog - it's run out of New Zealand :-)
But as Scott mentioned, the main noteworthy trend here is the number of countries where web innovation is happening. Perhaps I should've picked a headline that highlighted that...
But wheres the majority of development happens for these CA based companies? Any guesses.??
I'm not remotely surprised that all the action for search engines is in CA -- you'll likely see this trend in web startups overall as well -- and this is because that's where all the VC money is. VC money seems to be so specifically concentrated there that those in other US locations find it difficult. The US just fundamentally has a more entrepreneurial culture -- both in terms of VC attitude and governmental support. Here in the UK it's utterly barren -- to get any kind of funding you need to have a business plan looking 3 years ahead. Meh.
Here are the 6 search engines where I wasn't sure about their location. If you can confirm any, please leave a comment below.
Once I have all 100 I'll post a spreadsheet with the full list on our blog.
Hi Scott,
Planetsearch.com is one of my metasearch projects. Recently, we began redirecting the searches from planetsearch to our new project http://www.crawl.com . Planetsearch's beginnings were from 1997 when it was the default search engine for the original WebTV before Phillips sold it to MSN. Location answer: Las Vegas, NV