Google’s (Not) Top 5 Rivals – Small Search Engines that Didn’t Make the Cut
Google, while the obvious first choice in online search, isn’t the only game in town. Rival search engines include other big dogs like Bing and Yahoo, as well as…lesser ones. Competitor DuckDuckGo.com has made complaints of a range of Google anti-competitive practices that have severely impacted its ability to market its services. Other search engines don’t have recourse to such an excuse for why they’ve been unable to capture a significant market-share of search users.
Here are five more of Google’s (Not) Top 5 Search Engine Rivals, which won’t be giving a Google a run for their money any time soon.
5. MillionShort.com
Ever said to yourself, “What’s the least popular search result for any given term?” Then Million Short is for you. The site pledges to omit up to one million of the most popular search results for a keyword, leaving you with the more obscure search results out there. How obscure? As far as Million Short is concerned, Google doesn’t exist.
4. Ask Jeeves (RIP)
The site with the butler – is no more, since replaced by the less domestic Ask.com, which got out of the search game. Serving more as a Question-and-Answer site like Quora or Yahoo! Answers, Ask.com is more suited to culling crowdsourced answers to questions like “Why should I bother to use Ask.com?”
3. Blekko
Blekko.com promised to change the game of search engine marketing by giving users the ability to curate a list of their own suggested search results for terms, called slashtags. Those searches were only as valuable as the users who created them, and so, as you might expect, there were plenty of hits and misses. If Blekko could have sorted out how to make that unique feature a true value-add, they might have had something. For now, the existence of a /blekkosucks slashtag might be all I need to point to.
2. Help Rick San Francisco
The now defunct Helpricksf.com has accomplished the rare feat of developing the worst user-interface ever. Ever. The creation of a ‘90s mortgage broker who wanted to get in on Google’s sweet, sweet search engine action, Help Rick has been Geocities-ed to hell. Scrolling banners, cluttered screen, and as slow as molasses, the site has it all – except great quality (local) search results.
1. Worst Search
Proudly declaring itself “The Worst Search Engine On the Web,” WorstSearch.com lives up to its name and that ambitious pledge. Search for “search engine marketing,” and you’ll find the #1 result is someone’s Blogspot site that hasn’t been updated since November 2, 2007. The first result for “Barack Obama” is a URL on Allposters.com. Frankly, WorstSearch.com is the best worst search engine ever.
