Have you tried an alternative search engine lately? I know, as an SEO marketer or search engine marketing consultant, you probably groan every time somebody suggests it. Yes, these other have ridiculously small market share. But just remember, the one to watch in the future isn’t Google. The one to watch is the one who’s going to beat Google. It’s only a matter of time. No monopoly stands forever…
Duck Duck Go – The latest little star in the arena. Uses crowd-sourcing from sites like Wikipedia to gain relevance. They’ve also gotten some ink for using Perl on Linux Apache, the classic old-school LAMP in an age of PHP bandwidth-hogs.
Stumble Upon Search – Don’t look now, but Stumble Upon has been in business for a good five years now, and their archive of crowd-sourced voted links is starting to become a reliable place to search.
The Wayback Machine – If it’s media you’re looking for, don’t forget to make this your first stop. As time marches on, the archive gets more content every year.
Banana Slug – An off-beat idea: What if we combine your search term with a random keyword from a category you select? These are where the experiments are happening. Try it out, and you’ll find out just how unexpected your results can be.
Yandex – Never heard of it? It’s Russia’s biggest search engine!
Yoozilla – Actually, this one’s up for sale. Their whole point in the first place was to be a “Web 2.0” search.
Addict-O-Matic – A must-have for buzz marketers, this engine checks the hottest word-of-mouth as fast as it can.
