Do you remember when every alternative - and major - search engine begged and pleaded for you to make their search engine your homepage?That has certainly faded out now, at least amongst the Alts, and in recent memory has shifted heavily to toolbars.

At one point I had so many toolbars on my menu bar, that the chances of using any particular one decreased inversely with the number I added. Some, like this one from ChaCha, learned to pack more into less of that valuable toolbar space.

Then came the site search boxes, like my Swiki, or the famous  Collarity Compass.

 

Or, like deligio, a box version of their site on your site!

Then, as fast as you can say “widget,” everyone had one. The Sphere widget;

The Lijit Wijit (note clever spelling!)


exotic tools such as the FindSounds Palette



…or the recently announced Hakia ScoopBar.



Omgili doesn’t have a tag cloud, it has “Buzz Graphs” for your site.


Youlicit has three small toolbar buttons that you can use.





And here’s the 1-Click Answers from Answers.com.


This quick look at the alternative search engines leads me to the following conclusions:

* With the Top 100 Alts sharing, at most, 5% of the Search market, trying to get the users that they do have to change their entire homepage is too much to reasonably expect; it’s a non-starter. Most of the Alts have removed that offer.

* Toolbars took off like crazy. They were essentially miniaturized, flattened homepages, and you could easily have more than one. At first they were the full-length toolbars, sometimes with a hodge-podge of options (in order to justify all of that space). But if you opened more than one, you quickly shrank the size of your viewable page!

* So the strategy became one of offering smaller pieces of toolbars (see the ChaCha and Youlicit examples, or the Hakia ScoopBar). If the search engine only took up a few inches of space on your toolbar, then maybe you would go ahead and squeeze it in.

* Meanwhile, many search engines had realized that if you didn’t come to them to search, they could come to you -in the form of a search box on your site. It could literally be a site search box, similar to a Eurekster Swiki, or the Collarity Compass. or it could just be a boxed version of the Alt like the Deligio image above.

* But lately, the Alts have begun analyzing their unique strengths and creating widgets around them. Omgili tracks conversations; now their widget can graph them for you. Answers.com could always define words for you, but now their widget allows you to click on any word at any time! FindSounds has the FindSounds palette (above).

Do you remember these? In the beginning the trick was to get you to the search engine, and then snag you with the homepage or toolbar offers. Now, from the other end of the “handcuffs,” you might get sold on a very interesting widget, which might then tie you into the whole search engine for your particular search needs.

Have any of you changed your homepage?

How many toolbars do you have right now?

Have you tried any of these widgets?

Please take a minute to leave a quick response.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 17th, 2007 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Innovations. 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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