Contenders, ready. Who’s hoping to become the next Google?

It seems like Google has been the dominant search company since time began but in reality it wasn’t that long ago we were habitually using the likes of Lycos, AltaVista and the previous giant of the internet, Yahoo!



Companies come and go and no company should ever be arrogant enough to think that they are too strong to be challenged. Google may have expanded into other areas of the internet but the bulk of their income still comes from search advertising. The fact is that there is always space for a new player to come in with the right product to take a decent chunk of the search/advertising market.

So which contender is brave enough to take on the Mountain View gladiator? Actually, there are a few ready to put themselves in the running for top-spot and some sound as innovative as Google was back in the day. Here’s a look at a few of them and what they have to offer.

Powerset

Powerset describes itself as “A better way to search and discover information in Wikipedia articles.” This search engine was launched in May 2008 and currently works on Wikipedia articles rather than the full internet, so far. It’s easy to see how the technology could be expanded to become a full internet search engine. It understands natural language searches better than current search engines and returns incredibly rich, detailed results. There is a lot of work ahead for this one but it is off to a good start. Whether people will want to search using sentences rather than keywords remains to be seen but the rewards are great if they do.

Wikia

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia started Wikia a for-profit search engine using similar human collaboration techniques to Wikipedia to improve the search experience. So far Wikia has had a tough time, its results have been criticised and it has admitted that so far they have not been great. Wikia may have launched too early, before much of the technology it promised was actually ready.

Having Wales behind Wikia gives this project some credibility though and the idea of making search open source appeals to many. It’s a nice idea and one that might be successful in the long term, just as Wikipedia was.

Project Quaero

Project Quaero is a project funded by the French government to the tune of around £100 million. It has made headlines as being a future European Google killer but the project is actually designed to be a set of multilingual, multimedia indexing tools rather than a straight Google style search engine. Quaero floundered at first as the German backers dropped out to concentrate on Theseus instead. The hiring process is well underway now though and a big meeting to draw up a roadmap for the project is scheduled for this month.

Blekko

Rich Skrenta has an interesting history. At high school he wrote the first self spreading computer virus, he co-founded the Open Directory Project and has worked on numerous other successful projects. He is now employing staff in order to build a new search engine and appears to have funding from two ex-Google employees. It’s difficult to imagine this project not making waves of some sort.

Cuill

Cuill, pronounced “cool” was founded by husband and wife Tom Costello and Anna Patterson along with Russell Power. They say their search engine is able to index pages at a tenth of the cost that Google does thanks to new search architectures and relevance methods. They have secured funding for the project and there have been rumours that Google have attempted to buy Cuill. An interesting project which we will, no doubt be hearing more about in future.


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