When Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched Google from a garage in 1998, you could practically here the line from Field of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come.” And come they did. Nearly 10 years later, Google is the clear leader in search. In any industry, however, when one leader comes to so clearly dominate the field, alternatives start to sprout, like mushrooms, from the shadows.
Three alternative search engines have been getting a lot of coverage lately: Ask.com, Hakia, and Mahalo. One, Ask, is hardly what you would call a new search engine, while Hakia takes a semantic approach, and Mahalo is, well, hardly a search engine at all. Each of them, however, clearly shows that, while Google may be the leader right now, alternative search engines still have value in today's search landscape.
Alternative Search Engines: Ask (ask.com)
As far as alternative search engines go, this may be the one searchers find most familiar. From its years as AskJeeves, Ask has lagged behind Google, Yahoo, and MSN. With the recent rollout of Ask 3D, though, Ask has shown it is ready to hang with the big boys again. Do a simple search for “The Pyramids of Giza” on Ask, and you'll receive a left column that gives you suggestions to help narrow your search, expand your search, or find related subjects. The middle panel returns standard search results, and the panel on the right offers two video clips that preview the first few seconds when you mouse over them. While Google Universal Search also returns multiple search media for a lone search, Ask trumps Google in presentation. And for lifestyle or entertainment type searches, Ask is clearly preferable. If this is what alternative search engines of tomorrow are going to look like, then bring on the future.
Alternative Search Engines: Hakia (hakia.com)
Hakia bills itself as a semantic or meaning-based search engine. As most traditional search engines lean heavily on the occurrences of the keyword being searched, Hakia aims to deliver a “meaning match” that mimics human brain cognitive functions. Among alternative search engines, Hakia is the one most like to deliver vastly different results when queries are phrased with question-based qualifiers, such as Where or What.
Alternative Search Engines: Mahalo (mahalo.com)
A the creation of Jason Calacanis, Mahalo is less like a search engine and more like a directory. While Hakia aims to mimic human brain cognition, Mahalo takes it one step further and just uses humans. A staff of editors scours the web and personally filters sites to deliver what they think are the best matches to a search query. To date, there are only results pages for 4,000 searches. The hope is have 25,000 by the end of 2008.The problem with human-based alternative search engines, however, is that you have to have trust in the editors. Plus, they will never have the range of algorithm-based search engines. And Calacanis, being a vocal opponent of search engine optimization, has to hate that as search terms with no editor-built results default to Google results.
