I assume that most of AltSearchEngine’s readers are familiar with the Top 100 list. Here is the June Top 100 (attached spreadsheet), which we will discuss in detail below. For those who are new, here’s a very brief history of the list.

A brief history of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines

Read/WriteWeb first published my list of the Top 100 Alt Search Engines (ASE) back in January, and this has been followed by monthly updates. ‘Alternative’ means that each entrant exhibits at least one characteristic that surpasses the equivalent feature in one of the major search engines. Ultimately, the final decision to be listed rests with me; and it’s a subjective choice, not an empirical one. 100 search engines are too many for any one person to practically tour, so I now tag ten of each month’s ASE with an ‘Honorable Mention’ symbol [HM]. If you can, try to at least check out the Search Engine of the Month and the ten Honorable Mentions.

And while it sometimes appears as if we have just reached into a bag and pulled out 100 random search engines, they actually come from our Master List of 1,000 carefully edited ASE. So each search engine truly has a 1 in 10 chance of being on the Top 100. It’s just like an iceberg with 90% of it’s mass underwater and the 10% tip showing above the water.

The Search Engine of the Month

The crowning feature of the List is the selection of the Search Engine of the Month from amongst that month’s Top 100. Previous winners have been Gosh Me, KoolTorch, and AfterVote. If you haven’t used those alt search engines, you should be sure to visit them sometime this month.

As for our June list on this, our launch day, we have a completely revised version of the Top 100 ASE attached as an Excel spreadsheet.

It’s a tie! Quintura and KartOO; Search Engines of the Month

But the biggest surprise is that our award of Search Engine of the Month was a tie! The co-winners are Quintura and kartOO. As part of the two-dimensional clustering model, these two excellent ASE have been busy refining their products with recently announced features that keep them on the top of their game.

First: Quintura

First Quintura. Based in Moscow, Quintura is headed up by Yakov Sadchikov. The primary characteristic of a search engine like Quintura is that the search results are not returned as a list, something that about 90% of the ASE, even those on the Top 100, do. The WWW is just that, a web. And a 3-D one. In order to represent accurately a web whereby all the points, or pages, can link directly to each other one, you would need a 3-D object like a globe. A one dimensional list is like writing down all of the cities in the US in one long straight column and saying, ‘There. that’s what my country looks like.’ The #32 city may be close to the #98 city, but you’d never know it by scanning the list.

Clustering Search Engines are better

Clustering search engines, including tag clouds, take this a step closer to reality by spreading the results out onto a flat 2-D, X-Y map. Quintura does it with words, and KartOO with colorful icons. This is like an Atlas; the world isn’t really flat, but looking at a map of the US is far more intelligible than that list of cities.

Ultimately, search engines, possibly an ASE, will get it perfect with a truly 3-D interface. For a glimpse of the future, see SpaceTime or EveryScape. One concern that I have with clustering engines, and I know that it sounds like sour grapes, but having made that first leap forward from 1-D lists to 2-D maps, they seem content to stop there when they should keep pushing on and lead us in the real Search 3.0; Searching within a 3-D user interface.

How it works

Getting back to Quintura; after you enter your search query, you are presented with a tag cloud of words that looks like a just-finished Scrabble game. Moving your cursor to the word that most closely matches what you are looking for causes the to cloud to rearrange around that term. You glide though the Internet this way, until you have ’steered’ yourself to the best results; even if its something you did not know was there when you began your search. Yakov refers to this aspect of Quintura as a Web discovery engine.

He is constantly tweaking Quintura, adding a back/forward bar to the tag cloud, partnering with blinkx for their video search (as did ChaCha). In order to monetize his product, Quintura is able to lease out his tag cloud technology to other companies with large indexes. He is also looking to incorporate sponsor’s graphics and icons directly into the tag cloud - now that’s a slick idea! Finally Quintura has a kids version, and is developing a version tailored to women.

Next: KartOO

While KartOO functions much like Quintura, laying out your search results in a 2-D field of results, it’s obvious from the homepage and the search results page that KatrOO’s graphic artists have been working overtime producing colorful logos and glowing miniature pages that connect to each other in different ways as you navigate through the results. This is their trademark Semantic Map. And like Quintura, Kartoo’s technology can be adapted to all kinds of sources.

Constant improvement is the rule

And also like their peer Quintura, KartOO has just recently been refining their engine, which they announced in a press release on Friday. But call up Kartoo’s President Laurent Baleydier, and you’ll notice a key difference between our two winners: KartOO was developed at the French University Labs in Clermont, France. (Quintura is Russian, remember?)

Which one do you like?

Hopefully you’ll take time today to try out a few searches with Quintura and KartOO.
I think you’ll see why it was too hard to chose between them. I believe that in the Search community there are those who prefer the more traditional, text based tag cloud of Quintura’s, and those who like all the colorful graphics and cartoonish features of KartOO. The comments section below is your opportunity to come back after you’ve tried taking them both for a spin.

Please report back your impressions; but try to be concise, and please be polite. I will ask Yakov and Patrick to look in at your comments and make responses of their own, so be sure to check back and look for them; as well as those from your fellow readers.

The Top 100 Search Engines - any more?

Finally, if you think we missed a good alt search engine, please mention it as a comment,and I will follow up on it for next month’s list; or just email me directly: Charles@ReadWriteWeb.com.

Editor’s note: Quintura is a sponsor of AltSearchEngines.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 5:00 pm and is filed under Top 100. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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