Every now and again we report on new emerging search engines, looking at the potential they have for “making it” big, and attracting searchers and advertisers, as well as the interest of search engine optimisers.
We’ve reported on Wolfram Alpha, Cuil & Searchme, Wikia Search and another update on Wikia Search later by Joe. Emily also recently mentioned Oparla, another search engine that looks to pay users when they search.
Since these posts, we’ve not really seen much further publicity on these engines – I decided to have a quick look to see if they are all around.
Wolfram Alpha still seems to be going strong, although it did crash my browser (it was the only thing running on my machine at the time), and after a restart took almost a minute for it to return the results of the simple search “2+3″ – Wolfram Alpha isn’t really a search engine as such, although at launch there was a lot of hype surrounding it. Even after returning my search result, it again crashed my browser, as it was still trying to load some ads that my browser didn’t seem to want to display. Not sure that I will be returning there in a hurry – but what Wolfram Alpha was built for doesn’t really satisfy the reasons that I have for searching (in terms of the type of result it can display for a search).
Cuil still seemed to be going, but when I searched for "SEO", every result on that page was not a UK company. The paid ads also appeared to be being served by Google, which I found somewhat surprising, as I thought they may want to introduce their own advertising platform to get revenues from. However, I suppose that using Google’s system is simpler and requires less investment to gain some return. It’s a pretty search engine, but I don’t see this penetrating the mainstream anytime soon.
It looks like Searchme has kicked the bucket, as it now 301 redirects to Google.com.
Wikia search is another that seems to be no-more, now redirecting to Wikia Answers – from further investigation on the Wikipedia, it seems that the end of the journey for this engine was only in May of this year, after only gaining 0.000079% of the US search market.
Oparla is still going, although is a relative newcomer to the market – not quite sure how you get paid from surfing on this engine though, which is mentioned on it’s about us page.
So, it seems that there is only a limited life for a lot of the search engines that come onto the market, despite the hype and publicity that often surrounds their launch.
Whilst reading some commentary about the recent potential search merger between Yahoo and MSN, in a comment on one article I found mention of another new search engine looking to enter the market Tazoodle:
Although early days in it’s development (it currently says that it is launching in Fall 2009), I’m not sure that there is anything new in the design for this engine.
Similarly to Oparla, this engine is looking to enable search engine users to earn $$ by viewing advertisers on this engines listings, and will not bid for placement for advertisers, allowing for those with large and small budgets to be seen equally.
It will be interesting to see if Tazoodle can carve out a niche in the search market for itself – I suspect that it is unlikely, based on the success of some of the other emerging engines that we have looked at in the past, but with Yahoo and Bing searches likely to be merging, there is still a market for increasing competition in the search engine arena.
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