Editor’s note: Here are my Top 100 Alternative Search Engines for the year 2007 (attached).

Just to review, the 10 Search Engines of the Month were:


1) Quintura

2) Answers.com

3) Exalead

4) Omgili

5) KoolTorch

6) GoshMe

7) AfterVote

8. KartOO

9) Dialogus

10) Onkosh

And of course the Search Engine of the Year was Quintura.

Here’s what I think is the Top Story of the Year. At the beginning of 2007, the five major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and Ask) had at least 95% of the search “pie” (it could be as much as 98.3%). At the end of 2007, the same five major search engines, with slight individual changes, still had at least 95% of the search “pie.”

That’s right. An entire year of effort, with countless launches, innovations, partnerships, updates, new features and technologies, widgets and awards, and yet not one “Alt” came anywhere close to the roughly 5% of market share that AOL and Ask have. (At best, a few may have a shot at 1%.)

I would bet my bike that not one reader, without notes, could name 20 of the Top 100 Alts of the Year. Close your eyes and name the 10 Search Engines of the Month just listed above.

Between 01/01/07 and 12/31/07, AltSearchEngines has tried to make a case for some of these “Top” alternative search engines to formally band together behind a common banner with the goal of creating a “sixth” major search platform. Not by merging, no, not at all, but simply by joining forces with a common User Interface.

If nothing else, it is at least fair to say that that is one approach that hasn’t been tried yet. (Although MetaSearch engines have tried in their way, multiple search engines with one homepage.)

Well, the year is officially over and obviously all of my musings did not produce any coalition of Alts. So, speaking for this blog, should we spend 2008 beating the same drum? No, no.

As many of you have read, 2008 will be the year that AltSearchEngines will partner with an outside startup company with the same objective as ours - out of many, one - but not by moaning and groaning every week! It’s much more of a “take the bull by the horns” approach. After all, there are other ways to motivate people other than cajoling them.

But by necessity, most of this project will take place behind closed doors for a while, but our mission of showing you “the most wonderful search engines you’ve never seen” will continue every single day.

You will still see lists of verticals, like the Top 10 European Alternative Real Estate search engines we covered today, more Debates between Alts, Views from the CEOs of these Alts, lots of Guest Authors, interviews and profiles, plus International search engines every Saturday. We will also continue to watch the ones in Stealth mode for you, too.

AltSearchEngines will continue to be the one place that will show them all to you.

Then we have a bunch of new features to begin announcing in 2008. You can expect to see even more reasons to stop by in the days, weeks and months to come.

The bottom line: AltSearchEngines will continue to support and promote all of the alternative search engines: vertical or horizontal, individually or grouped, fairly large or very small, in English or Russian, Arabic or Australian. And when there is a new feature or innovation, we’ll let you know about it right away. We want AltSearchEngines to be the only blog you need to read - for alternative search engines, that is.

Please note: I am attaching the Top 100 of the Year as a .pdf file and an .xls spreadsheet.

But I am also attaching a .pdf and .xls of all 227 alternative search engines that appeared on any of the monthly Top 100 lists (just the names).

Lastly, tomorrow we will post the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines for January 2008. To be sure, it won’t be very different from the 12/31/07 list, but it is a fresh start. There will be many search engines that are now in stealth or closed alpha/beta mode that will join the List in 2008, and 10 new Search Engines of the Month (Feb - Nov) and of course another Search Engine of the Year on 12/01/08. [2006 was ChaCha; 2007 was Quintura]

Thank you very much for reading and commenting this year, thanks to all of our Guest Authors and Debate partners and the great Alt CEOs, thank you Richard, and thank you especially to our Sponsors.

See you next year!

Alternatively yours,

Charles Knight, editor
AltSearchEngines.com
Read/WriteWeb network

The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines of the Year (.pdf)

The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines of the Year (.xls)

This entry was posted on Monday, December 31st, 2007 at 7:00 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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