Web Search Alternatives

Google is the first choice in web search for more than 65 percent of the Web, while the shared efforts of Microsoft and Yahoo have earned Bing the market’s only other significant share.

Blekko
When Blekko launched back in November 2010, there were plenty of doubters who didn’t expect the startup search engine to last more than a year. While that may not be guaranteed just yet, Blekko is making good on its promise of creating a new and exciting alternative in search.

Blekko’s mission, some three years in the making before its actual launch, was to enlist human editors in an effort to eliminate spam and personalize and socialize the search experience. The team of 25 or so employees includes former Google and Yahoo search engineers and the project has received significant backing from some of the best known investors in the tech world.

The magic behind the Blekko vision was to use programming related slashtags or topic tags to create the most relevant search verticals for users. Those very users would be among the editors curating and maintaining the slashtags, and after three months Blekko reported that it had more than 110,000 human-curated tags.

Blekko clearly could not compete with the size and scope of Google’s or Bing’s indexes, but what it could — and does — do is produce more relevant, more accurate, better search results. Before Google made headlines around the globe with its Farmer Update algorithm changes, Blekko had removed the very same content farms (and many more) from its search index as a matter of standard practice — and to much less fanfare.

But what it may lack in publicity Blekko has made up for in terms of a devoted user base. Its January 2011 numbers indicated an average of 1 million queries per day and between 10 to 15 queries per second. And Google and Bing’s own publicity does them as much harm as good — the controversy over Bing’s “stolen” search results and Google’s paid links scandal with J.C. Penney being just two recent examples.

Perhaps that’s why Blekko and the alternative search options below have become favorites for many SEOs and Web professionals of every kind.

DuckDuckGo
Blekko recently forged a partnership with fellow startup search engine DuckDuckGo (DDG), in which the two companies share technologies and information in the name of improving the quality of search results for users. The partnership is sure to evolve over time, say the CEOs of both companies, but right now DDG receives access to Blekko’s auto-fired slashtags in seven categories (health,colleges, autos, personal finance, lyrics,recipes and hotels) in return for use of DDG’s proprietary feature, zero-click info.

Similar to Google’s Instant Search,zero-click info gives users the most relevant information on websites and search terms without having to click on search results. Local business listings from Yelp, word definitions from The Free Dictionary, Wikipedia entries andcontentfrom13additionalStackExchange sites are some examples of information users can find with zero-click results.

LikeBlekko, DuckDuckGo has developed quite a following and averages more than 5 million searches per month.

Greplin
Greplin is a user-authorized search engine that can search and index social services and applications such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Gmail, Google Docs, Evernote, Basecamp, Salesforce and more, and it’s adding more all the time. The startup recently announced the addition of a Chrome extension to its search presence so that users can now search their social data directly from the browser without having to go to Greplin’s website. Greplin may be the best known of a growing number of services such as CloudMagic that are designed for searching users’ social graphs for personal data and those hard-tofind items that often get lost in the cloud.

Wajam
Wajam is another socially driven search tool,but unlike Greplin it returns its results as part of your experience with Google or Bing. Where Greplin searches only the applications that have been preauthorized by the user, Wajam searches the entire Web but with an emphasis on returning personalized results from Facebook,Twitter and other social sites a user has bookmarked. It is used as a browser extension available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer, and injects these social results into the search queries submitted to larger engines.

Quora
Quora is the extremely popular new platform that strives to be the definitive questionand- answer site for just about any topic on the Web. Like Blekko, it is largely humandriven and invites users to ask questions, provide answers and share their knowledge and comments. Questions are organized into different categories that can also be created by users, leading to a wide range and growing index of topical information.

Nobody believes that these solutions will threaten Google’s dominance in the world of search any time soon, least of all the people behind each service. But most of them seem to be much more focused on improving the Web by providing a better way to access
information.

Google+ social networking

Google+ is Google's next attempt to create a presence in the social networking space. You can get on board only as an invitee.
The home page is very similar to Facebook, with a similar news feed and a lot of space around for additional features. One does not require a Gmail account to use the service, but if Gmail is your primary web mail platform there are a number of advantages, particularly for messaging.
When setting up an account, you will be asked to identify your friends and move them into customizable collections just how people build social groups offline. The friends you invite will not be able to see the names of the collections or the collections they are in, and can choose how much information to share and how.
Facebook has a similar functionality with its Lists system, but the two are conceptually and practically quite different. In Facebook Lists is and option and is not promoted. Google on the other hand is basing the entire system on silos on friend sand colleagues.
As Google+ grows, the difference may become apparent. Facebook users are already facing an ever increasing flood of information and the ability to trim and edit that will be crucial. Will users actively take up the option, or just make everything public to everyone anyway.
Google+ has good integration with Picassa and other image sharing sites so, uploading new photos is easy. You can also group photos taken on your phone, or by specific circles(collections.
Google+ offers sparks, a way to track news and posting on your favorite topics. It seems to consist of a series of news articles on a given topic.
The Hangout area functionality allows you to converse with up to 10 other people via webcam.
Google+ has a mobile android application which is easy to use, responsive and makes accessing key information, and particularly uploading images on the fly.
Google+ is a much more promising system than either of the company's previous attempts at social networking, but there does not seem to be any immediate threat to Facebook.
Google is getting very good at rolling out constant upgrades and tweaks to improve its applications and services. The platform needs users to take off, but it also needs developers to create the kind of applications that will keep customers coming back.
Google's lack of concern over the privacy of its user's data was a huge part in the
failure of Buzz.