Duck Duck Go is on my mind a lot these days :) Too much probably, but I think it actually embodies the future of search, for some fair sized percentage of the search market.
Right now they're at 0.035% of the market according to my estimates, that's only two doublings away from eclipsing altavista on it's way down.
DDG will be 'just what some people need', but not the general public, that's googles game. So to attack a giant like google you need to go the lilliputs way, many small search engines like DDG probably stand a better chance at nipping away at a giant like google than a single head-on competitor ever would.
Search engines are profitable at ridiculously low levels of traffic (I ran a toy one for a year), if there are good enough tools to tie a bunch of them together and allow keyword sales. This will also mitigate the costs of combating click fraud.
Another thing that could be done between such micro search engines is sharing spam lists.
DDG has been my default search engine for work and home for a long time now. It's lacking in a lot of refinement on the UI end, but it works, gives me good results, and I love the zero-click information.
There are only so many projects that I can devote my time to, it did not take off fast enough to warrant spending a whole lot of time on. I already have a lot of stuff on the go, if I try something new I have my expectations and if those are not met I kill it.
Right now they're at 0.035% of the market according to my estimates, that's only two doublings away from eclipsing altavista on it's way down.
DDG will be 'just what some people need', but not the general public, that's googles game. So to attack a giant like google you need to go the lilliputs way, many small search engines like DDG probably stand a better chance at nipping away at a giant like google than a single head-on competitor ever would.
Search engines are profitable at ridiculously low levels of traffic (I ran a toy one for a year), if there are good enough tools to tie a bunch of them together and allow keyword sales. This will also mitigate the costs of combating click fraud.
Another thing that could be done between such micro search engines is sharing spam lists.