Friday Fun: Weird Search Engines
While the serious talk today is about Freebase, a new next-gen search engine from Danny Hillis, it's the end of the week and so time for a bit of fun. Author of the popular Top Alternative Search Engines list, Charles Knight, flicked me an email this morning …
Context & Ripple Effects
This roundup lands six days after Library House reported search engines emerging from Google's shadow, and in the same week that Danny Hillis unveiled Freebase, pitched as a next-generation search play — so the week's serious conversation is about whether anyone can build a structurally different engine.
Read/WriteWeb takes the lighter route: Charles Knight, whose [[entity:Top Alternative Search Engines]] list has become the reference catalog of the non-Google field, sends over a set of deliberately odd engines. The pairing matters because it shows the alternative-search scene of early 2007 running on two tracks at once — heavyweight semantic bets like Freebase and novelty engines that win attention precisely by not trying to be Google.
First-order effects
- The quirky engines Knight surfaces get an immediate visibility boost through Read/WriteWeb's audience, and Knight's own Top Alternative Search Engines list picks up fresh entries and referral traffic.
- Freebase sits in the background of the piece as the week's counterpoint: while Hillis's project draws the analytical attention, the roundup keeps reader interest spread across the long tail of small engines.
Second-order effects
- For the small engines featured, differentiation shifts toward novelty and vertical focus, because competing with Google or Freebase on core relevance is off the table — their realistic path is being the tool a list post sends a burst of curious users to.
- Curators like Knight gain leverage: a single email to a widely read blog functions as distribution, which makes list authors a gatekeeping layer between tiny search startups and mainstream awareness.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, search in this era fragments into two markets — general-purpose engines fighting on structure and semantics (the Freebase track) and a durable ecosystem of specialist and novelty tools sustained by curation, with neither displacing Google outright.
- List-based curation hardens into a real discovery channel for search products, an early instance of aggregators, not advertising budgets, determining which alternative engines get tried.
The trend: Mid-decade search is diversifying past Google along two parallel tracks — semantic rethinks like Danny Hillis's Freebase and curated niches cataloged by list-makers like Charles Knight.