Book Mark: Old Googlers die hard?

I have recently become a user of Googles email, calendar, online document creation, Reader and of their wonderful personalised homepage. I've also started using a similar homepage based system called Netvibes which has a different, less clean feel to it (in my humble opinion of course) but has some great features not available as far as I know on Google. So it seems that people are getting sick of Google's dominance of the search engine market, or are they? Google currently perform about 75 out of 100 searches performed. And, they are good. I invariably find what I want or need on that first page of results. I do make my searches specific though. I've started to use an alternative search engine based in the UK called Rectifi (http://www.rectifi.org.uk/).
It raises money for charity every time it is used. You can also track how much you personally have raised for charity which is nice if you're in the mood for giving your halo a polish.

By all means, carry on Googling, but try and rectifi (geddit?) your habits and use an alternative. More on braking the Google habit follows below from the BBC...

Google's dominance of the search market, which in the UK stands at 75%, is increasingly being challenged by rivals desperate to become popular with a generation of web users growing up with Google as their homepage.

Given that search is the number one web activity and intrinsic to the fabric of online life it is perhaps strange that most people are content to limit their information-seeking to just one search engine.

With few studies to prove that Google's results are significantly better than its rivals, search engines such as Ask are keen to persuade users to experiment with the alternatives.

But it is going to be hard to break the Google habit.

"There is nothing to stop people using other search engines," said Nate Elliot, analyst with research firm Jupiter.

"It isn't much trouble to go to another but people increasingly have Google on their browser window and even for those that type it in each time it has become a habitual thing,"

It wasn't always so. Mr Elliot remembers a time when searchers were a "far more fickle bunch", with search engines such as AltaVista and HotBot flavours of the month.

Google noise

Google's popularity was partly kick started by its clean, uncluttered homepage which won many admirers.

Now efforts to tie users to it with downloadable search toolbars and services such as Gmail and Google Earth are paying dividends, while partnerships with ISPs, portals and social networks are cementing its brand in consumers' minds.

"There have been no real studies to prove that Google has better
results but people think that the results are better," said Mr Elliot.

"Google is seen as being innovative and they do a great
job of portraying themselves as innovators. That could be a matter for
debate but in the consumer's mind it isn't," he said.

With the search marketing spend in the UK netting a
healthy £607m in 2006, being an also-ran in the race to beat Google can
be profitable and, increasingly, rivals are realising that overtaking
Google in the near future will be a mammoth task.

"It's not about overhauling Google but more about
narrowing the gap. There is no point trying to be a flat-out copy. It
is more a question of offering a different experience with tools that
provide users with a better experience," said Mr Elliot.

Ask, which last year ditched its iconic butler Jeeves,
has been working hard to differentiate itself with tools that allow
users to get a miniaturised version of a site before they visit it as
well as offering ways to refine search around related topics.

Ask has adopted guerrilla tactics to tackle the 800lb
Google gorilla in its latest marketing campaign. In a series of TV ads
it is represented as a revolutionary underground alternative.

"The Google brand is so ubiquitous that people stop
listening to the messages of alternative engines. It is hard to fight
through the noise that surrounds Google, especially in the media," said
Jim Lanzone, chief executive of Ask.

"When it comes to information people shouldn't limit themselves to one option.

"It isn't really anti-Google. Google just happens to be
the brand that people are unreasonably attached to and the issue is
that people are not experimenting with other products. It is not about
overthrowing the regime but more why you should also elect us," he
said.

Meta-search

But while there are studies that show people do not
think search in general is not as good as they would like, there is
little evidence that they are looking to switch their loyalties from
Google.

"If people don't get the results they want, they tend to think they
have done something wrong, that they should have used a better search
term. The reality is that every search engine has clutter and spam and
none are as good as they should be," said Mr Elliot.

One alternative is the idea of meta-search - search engines that compile results from a variety of other search engines.

One such is WebFetch, the brainchild of InfoSpace, a
company that has been powering the search engines of companies such as
The Guardian, EMAP, the London Stock Exchange and Pipex for years.

WebFetch is InfoSpace's first foray into the consumer
market and it compiles results from all the leading search engines,
including Google, Ask, MSN and Yahoo.

It has limited ambitions - hoping to grab just 1% of the search market in the UK.

"We are not naive enough to think that we are going to
take over but perhaps people are looking for something different," said
Dominic Trigg, vice president of search and directories at InfoSpace.

Unlike Ask, WebFetch will not be relying on advertising
campaigns. Instead Mr Trigg and his team have been given a year to
build up the reputation of WebFetch, largely by word-of-mouth.

Its sister search engine in the US - DogPile - has won
some admirers. It beat Ask, Google, Yahoo and MSN in a poll conducted
by JD Power. The survey rated search engines on a set of criteria,
including functionality, ease of use and results.

People-powered

The movement to persuade users away from the dominant
search engines such as Google and Yahoo may be small but it is
gathering momentum from those with more solid radical credentials.

At the end of last year, James Whale, founder of the
online encyclopedia Wikipedia offered an alternative "people-powered"
search engine.

His plan, still in its infancy, is to Wiki-fy the
process of internet search, so that human beings decide openly how to
rank and organise information, not the huge private servers of Google
and Yahoo.

He labelled the project "Search Wikia" and has high
ambitions for it to be "the search engine that changes everything". The
plan follows criticism of the secrecy surrounding the algorithms of the
leading search engines.

The battle to challenge Google could be underway.