If Google has been able to crush its search competition, it's not because it has perfected the art and science of Web searching. Far from it. Google is what the industry calls a "second-generation" search engine. First-generation engines like AltaVista found Web pages containing words that matched the user's search words. Google's innovation was to further rank a Web page by the other pages that link to it, on the somewhat shaky assumption that if a page is much-linked-to, it must be useful. Charles Knight, an analyst who runs the AltSearchEngines Web site, notes there's a plethora of good ideas for what a third-generation engine might bring to the party, and no shortage of companies trying to prove those ideas. "Each has shown they can do some aspect of a search better than Google can," says Knight.
It goes on to describe three of the most talked-about challengers to date: vertical search engines, search refinement aids, and social search. Google, of course, has integrated each of these techniques into its own engine carefully, and has promised to do even more with vertical search to help users find reliable health information. Already, you can search for "cancer" and see prioritized medical results from Google Health, WebMD, and others.
It's worth a read, but to date, the only non-Google search experiences I've had that lead me astray live inside Apple's Safari browser and are, of all things, visual innovations. Try flipping through your personal history for a page you've recently seen in Safari 4--it blows the text-based histories seen in other browsers out of the water. Or the stolen-from-Chrome (I think) feature: screenshots of your top 8 favorite pages fill a new tab, supplanting bookmarking as the useful way to get to favorite site and more about personal information managemen.t
