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.

Links for traffic and search engine exposure

The one true secret of link building is that the best link has yet to be discovered. So staying on top of new traffic sources, distribution models and publicity opportunities will feed your website links that result in traffic and exposure well into the future.

Public Relations: Press releases don’t get enough credit as a means to drive website traffic, links and exposure for your websites and their underlying businesses. Services such as PRWeb, BusinessWire, PR.com, and PRNewswire are proven ways to get in front of not just the media but other website owners looking for content to feature on their sites (which means more links). While there is no guarantee that coughing up the often exorbitant fees to these providers will result in actual or immediate media exposure,you will be surprised at the speed at which you will acquire inbound links.

Classifieds: You might also be surprised at the amount of visitors that will come to your site based solely on classified advertising — free or paid. Some of the best sites available in the classified industry include craigslist, Oodle, USFreeAds, Backpage and Kijii but local newspapers are also a good way to get some attention, especially if you are working on a local or regional level. The best part about using classified advertising
to drive traffic is that the cost is often far lower than other promotional methods, if not completely free. But it’s not just the broad-scope classified sites that can generate attention. There are hundreds if not thousands of classifieds in every industry, providing an exceedingly targeted opportunity to generate new links of some notable quality.

Video: Another opportunity to gain exposure, and get links and traffic, is through the use of online video. While there are financial and time commitments to creating video, going viral can help get your website to a tipping point far faster than any other online channel. YouTube is by far the king of video sites, but there are hundreds of others including Vimeo,
Blip.tv, Viddler, 5min, Dailymotion.com, and MetaCafe. Are you distributing your videos to these outlets? Are you monitoring your videos’ success or failure, and watching the performance of others in these channels to see what’s getting noticed or ignored? If not, you need to be.If video is a serious consideration for your website, placing your content exclusively on YouTube is a good bet. Create a YouTube channel (even if you don’t have video content yet) and “friend” related users and “favorite” quality videos.The link from the YouTube Channel to your website is a do-follow link.

Content Development: The information age requires that you produce ... information. Take up a campaign to write content for others by reaching out to bloggers who cover related topics (find some guest logging prospects at BlogCatalog.com). There are many exceptional article directories where you will be able to submit your content including EzineArticles.com, Buzzle.com, GoArticles.com, IdeaMarketers.com, ArticleAlley.com and Amazines.com. These are just a few of the more well known directories but there are hundreds of others. Another very valuable opportunity is through Google Knol. Because any link from Google is worth getting, create content for a Knol and include some links — they too, are do-follow.

Getting Social: Social media has changed the way we connect with others and promote our products and services on the Web. From social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Bebo and hi5 to microblogging services like Twitter, Plurk and Plazes — even social bookmarking services such as Delicious, Digg, Stumbleupon, Mixx, Reddit and others — “social” presents wonderful opportunities to chart the course of memes and discussions, and are widely known as effective ways to create huge streams of website traffic and, ultimately, inbound links.

Directories: DMOZ and the Yahoo! Directory are two exceptional places to attempt to acquire links to your website, but there can be incredibly long wait times (DMOZ) and high prices (Yahoo!) to get included. Consider some alternatives including Business.com, BestofTheWeb.com, GoGuides.com, JoeAnt, RubberStamped. org, Skaffe.com, SiteSnoop.com, Gimpsy.com, IPL.org
and MassiveLinks.com