I’ve just been reading an interesting discourse over at Newsweek. It reminded me of a time when if you wanted to conduct a search, the only choice you had was Yahoo. Back then, no-one ever even considered that Yahoo might one day have to fight for their turf. Then, along came Google.

Almost overnight it became clear that the nascent world of online search would never be the same again. Google steadily worked its way to the top of the industry and has been there ever since. But who’s to say it’ll stay that way indefinitely?

This partial list of new search engines illustrates that there is plenty of potential competition. All it will take is for enough of us to get sufficiently ticked off with Google that we take our search elsewhere.

Clusty is one that I like because of the cluster of alternative searches to the left of the page. It helps on days when you’d rather have some help with your thought processes. :)

Another serious contender is Accoona, which has the dubious honor of being endorsed by former president Clinton. However, after trying it out a few times, I’m not at all sure that it has anything special to offer.

I’m going to use Clusty for a while as an experiment–in the same way that I was quick to adopt Google when it first appeared. Google has become too big and seems to have lost touch with its roots. Always a sad pass for any company, and usually the beginning of the end.