While Google is the top search engine, and will most likely continue to be that for a number of years, there is several thousand lesser search engines that are working hard to gain a piece of the search marketplace for themselves.
The English language market for search is dominated by a few big behemoths. According to a report by comScore the market in October 2009 was dominated by Google (65.4%), Yahoo (18.0%), MicrosoWcAgXF ft (9.9%), Ask (3.9%) and AOL (2.9%), followed by MapQuest, eBay, craigslist, Fox, MySpace, Facebook and Amazon.
Still with each 1% of the marketplace for search having a value of $3 Billion at yearly revenues of $332 million you don't have to conquer more than 0.1% percent of the market to make some serious money. The number of start up search engines is only going to increase with everyone wanting a piece of the market.
This is the top 7 search engines that the 2010 blog headlines are likely to gossip around. New or old, they all have in common that they deliver high quality search results and they have been innovating during 2009.
Cuil
Cuil is one of the few new search engines that is competing head to head with Google on index size and by claiming to be the worlds biggest search engine, managers and ex Googlers Anna Patterson and Russell Power has a lot to deliver.
Overloaded servers that generated low quality search results hampered the initial 2008 launch giving Cuil a lot of negative media attention but of you try a search today you'll find the search results are really good and there is an explore by category function that is among the best I've seen.
DuckDuckGo
The search engine with a silly name and a cute interface combines Yahoo BOSS, Wikipedia and it's own crawler DuckDuckBot to deliver both hard information in a Zero-click info box, categories to further refine searches and actual search results.
DuckDuckGo was launched in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg and is a private venture that has been growing steadily during 2009. Watch out for this search engine in 2010, it's got a fine niche carved out for itself
Spezify
A totally cool search engine, Spezify. It draws the search results as newspaper clippings spread out on the screen with a mix of images and quotes from web pages. Instead of clicking back and forth between web pages to decide which page provides you a solution you can read the brief clippings and get a good enough overview that you often can pick the right website on the first or second try.
Spezify is very handy tool for brainstorming. You'll get a ton of new ideas for your article or blog post just by typing your keyword into the search box and watching the resulting mix of clippings and photos.
Secret Search Engine Labs
This search engine ranks sites differently than the big mainstream search engines. As Google gives priority to aged and huge sites, many new, smaller and relevant sites are hard to find in their search results. Secret Search Engine Labs ranks sites based on page contents and links using their trademark CashRank algorithm to filter out questionable content.
A search engine that puts more emphasis on web page content than on site authority and that provides useful information to website owners on how the search results are calculated, Secret Search Engine Labs was founded in 2007 by Finnish software engineer and entrepreneur Simon Byholm with the aim to grow over time into the best search engine on the Web.
Bing
Bing is a re-branding of Microsoft's Live Search that was previously MSN Search. These days Microsoft has managed to get hold of almost 10% of the market share for web search by running an aggressive marketing campaign. As part of the relaunch there has been a fair amount of new features, like related topics using the know how from the search engine Powerset that Microsoft acquired in 2008.
With Microsoft working hard to increase Bing's share of the market you should watch them closely in 2010.
Blekko
With a management team with backgrounds Topix, Google, AOL and Netscape Search this startup search engine is as secretive as Google about what they will do next and when.
At the time of writing in early December 2009 they have not yet opened to the public but with a promised launch date in the end of 2009 this search engine will make big news in 2010. We can only hope it's good and exciting news.
Monitter
This is a real time Twitter monitor with reply and re-tweet options. You enter three keywords and after some processing the latest tweets containing your keywords start to roll down the screen in three separate columns. Really cool for keeping an eye on your area of expertise and joining in the conversation.
What About The Rest?
Google was left out of this listing as you already know that they are innovating and they will most likely make it into the news in 2010. Being the only notable search engine to create the search results from info in databases, Wolfram Alpha will be an interesting project to watch in the years to come.
In addition to my list of seven there is also a horde of new social and real time search engines coming and there's no way to know if one of them will become a permanent participant in the search marketplace. You will find more information about these and many more in this
list of search engines and on AltSearchengines.com
There is finally signs that we could see radical changes in the search engine landscape following years of rule by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and to some extent Ask. There's so much new technology out there. There's semantic search, visual presentation, real time search and socially powered search engines created. The result, even if we get no new top three, is that the ruling giants will have to keep innovating to keep up with the crowd and in the end we'll get a better search experience.