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I invited Sid to be a guest poster at the FyberSearch news blog and he readily agreed. Thanks Sid :) The Future of Search: The Evolution of the Alternates by Sid Yadav Over the past few years, search engines have developed. I’m not just blabbering here about Google and Yahoo!, nor do I intend to, but I’m also talking about the smaller ones -- LookSmart, Gigablast, SearchHippo, FyberSearch, and possibly countless others – have been evolving through time. If I were to think from a critique’s mind, I would say, “The web’s too big for smaller search engines, face it, you can’t beat Google!” but to me, that’s certainly not the case. I think small search engines have the right to exist, and after all, Google was once small, Yahoo! was once small, Teoma was once small. Everything started off small, but because people saw its potential, it grew big. The current “small,” or as some call it, “alternate” search engines, are no different. If we were to see the potential in them and really encourage them to move forward, gather some investors, and to just take the bull by its horns, there’s no doubt they would be the next to-come Google. Why am I saying this? Well, let me pass on to you a fact. Many think Larry Page and Sergey Brin invented Google. Literally, they did – they’re the co-founders, also known as the creators. However, this is not to say they invented the Google which you see now when you go to www.google.com. They only invented a part of it – the name, and the “starting” technology. In reality, because we saw the potential in it, they saw the potential in it, and thousands saw the potential in it, they went forward to take the effort to turn it into a real company with a team of technical people, executives, venture capitalists, and what not. If we had said that Inktomi was much much better (Inktomi was the biggest at the time that Google was first released in Beta) and that they were no good, would they still have been this great? Personally, I don’t think so. However, let’s not forget the fact that the web has changed from the time Google was invented, and that we are less in-need of good search engines than what we were at that time. We now have good search engines, and some fantastic people running them, but, we’ve got to evolve some time. And this time has to come – whether it’s today or tomorrow, I think we’re getting close to it day-by-day (of course we are!). When I point my browser to the FyberSearch (http://www.fybersearch.com/press.php. ) or the Gigablast Press page (http://gigablast.com/press.html. ), I am pleasantly surprised to see all of the coverage they get/are getting. When both the search engines, FyberSearch and Gigablast, first launched, maybe I should rephrase that, first got known to the public, I watched them as any other user would do. I remember Gigablast had an index of 30 million web pages (http://web.archive.org/web/20020602075638/http://www.gigablast.com/), and FyberSearch was reasonably new. But since their official “known to public” dates, both search engines have gone far. FyberSearch was featured on CNBC (http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/CNBCTV/Articles/TVReports/P91256.asp) while Matt Wells from Gigablast has had five interviews since the launch including one on SearchEngineWatch by Gary Price (http://www.searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3080321). If we contin |
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