Posted : August 2010
Author : entrepreneurboss
The Goliath that is Google has grown to almighty
proportions. Some ambitious companies though have tried to topple them and have
predictably failed. Here are 10 such fallen Davids.
Well, they didn't try to compete with Google in the overall
search space but computational knowledge (which is a big part of what people
search on Google). Google responded with their Google Squared application. From
being a hot trend several months ago, Wolfram Alpha is slowly dying off.
Status: Still in existence
2 Cuil
Cuil was also being promoted as a "Google crusher"
but in reality, it wasn't anywhere close to it. They boasted an index size of
several billions pages...so what? We don't want quantity, we want quality. Anyway, several days later, Google came up with a claim that
they index around a trillion pages which basically crushed the Cuil claim and
deprived people of the only reason they had of using it.
Status: Still in existence
3 Microsoft Live
Search
Microsoft’s sick old search engine that predated Bing,
nobody really used Live Search. Its market share steadily declined till the
launch of Bing, although we still don't know whether Bing’s increasing market
share is because of a temporary trend or because people have started to prefer
Bing over Google. Bing is features in this list of people search engines
by the way and seems really good for finding people.
Status: Dead
4 Wikia Search
Wikia was launched by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in
attempt to use human collaboration to create better search results. The idea
failed miserably and after 2 years, Wales gave it up.
Status: Dead
5 AllTheWeb
AllTheWeb was all about conducting specialized searches and
displaying real-time news (a feature that Google at that time was struggling
with). But that was back in 2002. In 2010, AllTheWeb receives 10000 times less
visitors than Google and all you see in its search results are sponsored ads at
the top and ordinary results after that. Another big fail.
Status: Still in existence
6 Ask.com
Back in 2008, news spread that Ask.com is the 'upcoming
Google killer'. The owners declared that Ask is 'more intuitive' than Google,
in addition to other similar BS claims. However, just optimism and enthusiasm
gets you nowhere on the internet and today, Ask.com has taken another (more
realistic) route of being specifically a Q&A type of search engine.
Status: Still in existence
7 Powerset
Powerset was launched back in 2008 as a service that used
Wikipedia and Freebase as search sources. Unfortunately, nothing changed much
after that and its search capabilities remain very limited. One of the reasons
behind its failure might have been its speedy acquisition by Microsoft soon
after it was launched, which meant that perhaps Microsoft was more focused on
developing LiveSearch and then Bing, than focus on 2 projects in the same time.
Status: Still in existence
8 MyLiveSearch
Nobody really knows what happened to them. There was a big
buzz about MyLiveSearch back in 2007. Their promise was to search the entire
web in real time and not build an index like Google. After the launch of the
beta, the feedback wasn't so positive and from then on, it seems to have gotten
stuck in an eternal “development stage”. So I'll mark their status as dead.
Status: Dead
9 Yahoo Search
The mighty has officially fallen and is now powered by Bing
search results. Yahoo, although still a huge company, also got pummeled by
Google in the search engine arena.
Status: Dead
10 Yauba
Yauba tried to use one of Google’s weaknesses, which is
supposedly privacy. They launched as a 'privacy safe 'search engine, but to put
it simply, their search results sucked. Yauba still exists but is barely
surviving.
Status: Still in existence
~Blog Admin~
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