By J. Reed

Now I know why Charles took his vacation over the Labor Day weekend!  Today is September 1st, and time for The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines List to be updated.  I do not envy anyone this herculean task.  Consider what AltSearchEngines has covered just in the past month of August alone:

*All of Hope’s medical search engines such as PatientsLikeMe and Medhelp.

*All of Rafi’s discoveries, including his 2 part series on Israeli start-ups and Green search engines.

*All of Peggy’s mobile search entries like JumpTap, mInfo, or Kannuu.

*Stealth search engines such as CloudTuner, or ubExact.

*Newcomers like Yoowalk or SocialOyster, and don’t get me started on Cuil.

*Even new categories like B2B Search (Demandbase).

*Global search engines such as Nipponster, Searchii, or ChinaKnowledge.

*The Top 10 People Search Engines, or the Top 10 Indian Music Search Engines.

*Misc. innovations like Errorkey and Abbreviations.com

*There are even ones that we did not get to that will have to wait until September.

*In all, the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines from August doubled to over 200*

And the new posts continue to pour in - 11 were mentioned just today!  Come on, people, slow down…

Well, there is no use complaining -  in fact we are celebrating the abundance of innovation!

And finally there is the matter of selecting one of these 200, whittled painstakingly back down to 100, as the Search Engine of the Month.  There will only be 10 of these this year when we select the Search Engine of the Year 2008 in December.

Well, in his absence I get to choose, and I select:

picitup!

If an image search engine can make this match, I think it deserves a second look!

Picitup – Alon and Dan Atzmon

Pictures anyone? But not just a simple picture search, Picitup has a lot of useful filtering features. The search begins with a textual query which registers a line of images, following which the user can pick the image he wants to find matching images for.

Where you go next depends on what you want to find. Your options are faces, landscape, products, or color. I guess, faces if you’re looking for a person, landscape if you’re looking for a scene, products of you’re making some sort of advertising campaign, and color if you’re making a collage. New features include picking a shape, a size, and a layout, as well as an image rank to rind the most popular ones on the net these days.

But this isn’t even the coolest part about Picitup, in my opinion, though it might be the most practical. (What good has practicality gotten anyone anyway?) Picitup’s face match service allows you to upload you photo and receive ten celebrity lookalikes.

I (Rafi) put them to the test. Personally, people think I look like Tobey MacGuire. A group of Ethiopian children once even started calling me “Spider” though they only spoke Amharic at the time, they knew the movie. And 2 drunk people confused me with him on the MTA in Manhattan and demanded an autograph. Does Picitup agree?

Here is the entire Top 100:

The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines, September 2008 (.pdf)

The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines, September 2008 (.xls)

This entry was posted on Monday, September 1st, 2008 at 9:03 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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