How often do you use Google (the search engine and its products) during your day? For me, the number is pretty ridiculous.

Will Google execute its master plan and take over the world continue to dominate search forever? Reports liken search and Google to advertising and television. Before cable TV there were a couple major networks that dominated the advertising dollars. Then cable created niche networks and gave viewers more choices. Advertisers loved it because they could focus their campaigns and viewers loved it because they had a choice.

Not to say searchers don't currently have alternative search methods, but as search is expanded and refined I think the little guys can collectively chip away at Google's market share.

Speaking of refined, alternative search methods, here is a list of engines I'm keeping an eye on:

Results Displayed Visually

Quintura

This search engine allows you to visually refine your search. I like that you can narrow your search down then glance at the narrowed results, and then if you don't like what you see you can just move the mouse, and your original results reappear. In other words you don't have to navigate away from the results page to refine your search results.

Kartoo

Kartoo also allows your to visually refine your search, but it shows screen shots of the sites as you rollover a result. The results are visually displayed as a map that is linked together by the terms that refine them. Their mascot also "surfs the web" as your results are being generated.

Searchme

Searchme also displays your results visually, and allows you to refine by vertical search category (images, movies, web). The results are displayed in a "stack" and if you like the stack you can save it to peruse later.

Viewzi

Viewzi allows you to choose how to display your results. They have several views to choose from. The site information view provides a lot of useful site information about the site you query, but I'm not sure how accurate some of the data is. Nonetheless it is an interesting approach to search.

Niche Search Engines:

Truila-- Real Estate

Healthline-- Healthcare

Like.com-- Shopping

Globalspec-- For engineering, industrial and technical communities

Spock-- People Search

Blinkx-- Rich media search engine. From their website, "Unlike other multimedia search engines that attempt to re-purpose technology built for the Text Web, blinkx uses a unique combination of patented conceptual search, speech recognition and video analysis software to efficiently, automatically and accurately find and qualify online video. Today, blinkx is the world’s largest single index of rich media content on the Web, delivering more content from a broader range of sources than either Google or Yahoo!"

Community Search/Human Edited-Search:

Del.ici.ous

The idea is for you to search other people's bookmarks. You are basically searching others' favorite results of the query.

Squidoo

Members create a "lens" about something they are an expert on. You can search the database for entries that match your query.

Wikipedia

Anyone can add, edit, or contribute to the encyclopedia's entries.

Sproose

From their website, "How Sproose works...Machine Calculated Results => Sproose Users Vote Websites => User Improved Results"

Mahalo

Mahalo actually builds search results pages themselves. From their website, "Search results built internally by our full time staff are checked by other Full Time Guides and our editors. We also have a place on every page where you, the public, can report problems or errors with our pages. Our Guides then check these errors and correct them. Additionally, we have a dead link checker which helps us remove links that are no longer functioning and a full time team watching the news to make sure that every hot search term or news item is updated quickly."

ChaCha

I personally use this service a lot. There are a couple of ways to use it.

• Dial 1-800-ChaCha
• Ask a question after the beep
• Receive a text message with the answer. (It is human-powered, so someone is actually looking up the answer for you)

• Go to ChaCha.com
• Type your question in their graphic mobile phone
• Add your phone number
• They will text you the answer (again, human powered)

I don't have an iphone so I love using this service. I'm sure they will have to think of ways to adapt as more and more people have their internet on their cell phones, but I think it is a very useful service while I have my simple cell phone.

All of my friends previously called Auburn's Foy Student Center where they will answer any question you may have, any question. But I think ChaCha is a great alternative to bothering the folks at Auburn.

-----

I don't think there will be any new search engine (any time soon) that could really threaten Google, but collectively I think there is a chance to take away some of Google's dominance. On the other hand, if any search engine begins to pull away from the pack they may just get Google-gobbled up. Obviously Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion, but they also have acquired smaller search engine types.

Google bought Israeli Search Engine Orion.

Google bought Kaltix, a three-month-old, three-man Stanford startup that's working on personalized and context-sensitive search.

Google acquired a key player in face and image recognition biometrics, Neven Vision.