In Search of The Best Search

These are legitimate questions for both the Internet business owner and the searching consumer. And all of us are ‘searchers' at one time or another on the Net. Of course we all know the top dogs of the search engine world: Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. But there's always underdogs who will challenge the established order of ‘The Big Guys' and search engine competition is no exception. While Google is aware of these competing Vertical Search Engines (defined on Wikipedia as ‘part of a larger subgrouping known as "specialized" search, these are relatively new tiers in the Internet search industry consisting of search engines that focus on specific businesses), the company already has many topic-specific searches integrated into its applications like Google Maps, Google Co-op, and more.

But this hasn't stopped an onslaught of saavy entreupeneurs from taking their best niche specific ideas into the search engine world with sometimes profitable results. This week, AOL announced the purchase of Relegence, a New York-based search engine specializing in financial news and information for an undisclosed price. Collarity CompassT launched earlier in the week and in a press release describes itself as "being a search engine that automatically ranks search results based on an individual's interests. By tracking the search terms, url choices, and selections of users and visitors, Collarity responds to a user's 'hot spot of interest' (i.e. query) with sites visited by expert-users in that area."