“I’m running for President!”
“Today we did what we had to do. They counted on America to be passive. They counted wrong.”
“Before I refuse to take your questions, I have an opening statement.”
-former President Ronald Reagan
My fellow bloggers,
After months of careful deliberation, I have decided to enter the 2008 market share race as an Alternative candidate. The major search engines have failed to address the needs of the alternative search engines. I get the impression that they feel that if they just ignore us we will simply go away. If 95% of all searchers vote for one of the major search engines, what chance does an Alternative Party candidate have polling only 5%? Will I just be another Ralph Nader, John Anderson or Ross Perot? I don’t think so.
I think 2008 is going to surprise a lot of people, and I want to be right in the thick of it. Consider the groundwork that we’ve laid in 2007:
*For the first time, there is a blog (this one) dedicated to Alternative Search Engines. Not just coverage of the Alts, but the promotion of them. A blog built on the premise that the future of Search belongs to them, if they will only choose to band together.
*For the first time, in March of 2008, there will be a conference that is not SMX, DEMO, SES, or FOW, but ASE. It will be a conference organized by Alts, with panels designed by and populated with Alts, for the benefits of Alts.
*Alternative partnerships are on the rise: Blinkx and ChaCha, Zuula and Mojeek, Pixsy and PureVideo, Picsearch and Onkosh, Exalead and Taiyat, Intelways and…everyone!
*Innovative technologies hold out great promise: Semantic Search, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Peer-to-Peer (P2P) search, by the likes of Faroo, Lexxe, Hakia and several others.
*We have Visualization covered, Verticals, Image and Audio search breakthroughs. While traditional search engines are still delivering 1-D lists of results, Quintura and KartOO - and others -have conquered 2-D results and 3-D is right around the corner.
*2008 will see an explosion of new Alts coming out of Stealth or Beta: Whozat?, true knowledge, SurfCanyon, Powerset, zumende, makidi, cuill, freekat, CastTv, NosyJoe, MyLive Search, nsyght, ohigo, gloofi, CareerMesh, Digger, dipsie, iMedix, iPrecis, mobot, PolarRose, Palore, just to name a few!
*All successful political campaigns have their armies of volunteers, and so do the Alts. Hundreds of Alts have chosen to associate with other alternative search engines via LinkedIn, and their “friends of friends” number in the tens of thousands.
*The major search engines are all global - but so are we. AltSearchEngines has an ever-increasing number of volunteers in countries all around the world. Every week we welcome another country into our little gang.
*And what about involvement? Every week we have Alt CEOs willing to engage in Debate with their “competition” (Tuesdays) or write letters to our readers (Wednesdays), or submit their own articles (Thursdays).
Is anyone listening? Heck, yes! As soon as I hit the “Publish” button, this post, like all the others, will fly into 1,000 Inboxes or RSS readers, and three times that many people will stop by here to read the latest news about these alternative marvels.
Every week we receive, like any other blog, requests to demo, to interview (and be interviewed), to speak and to write - all about the Alts. Media interest is increasing,
So I’m throwing my hat into the ring, and I’m asking for your support. I also want to thank those who have already shown their support - our sponsors Quintura, PeekYou, Hakia, Kosmix and Eurekster.
God bless America!
Charles S. Knight
October 7th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today!.Here’s a quick excerptAfter months of careful deliberation, I have decided to enter the 2008 market share race as an Alternative candidate. The major search engines have failed to address the needs of the alternative search engines. I get the impression that … [...]
October 7th, 2007 at 6:16 pm
[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt“Today we did what we had to do. They counted on America to be passive. They counted wrong.” “Before I refuse to take your questions, I have an opening statement.” -former President Ronald Reagan. My fellow bloggers, … [...]
October 7th, 2007 at 9:49 pm
this is a wonderful speech.I am expecting that some of the ASEs, will jump out of the 100 list and become big ones, and new ASEs are standing up to fill the blanks. Let ASE be a greenhouse for all to flourish.
I am impressed in the year of 2007 by ASE and I am thinking high of us in 2008.
October 8th, 2007 at 11:23 am
Charles, you are a fantastic ASE promoter. We are glad to have you here, you are doing great job writing about alts and how they can shape the future of search. In 2008 many unexpected things will happen and we are here to keep surprising people with our search capabilities, putting more pressure on big ones.
Big search engines have little room for growth they are slow and conservative, while ASE is free, implements radical ideas and have potential for a big jump.
You are the president of free people