Staying ahead of Google by searching differently

In the spirit of fighting for the little guy and building movements, I’d like to champion the following sites in their quest for a piece of the search engine action:

mahalo.com: A human-powered search engine that creates very smart search results pages, above and beyond just a page of results. “Mahalo” to our fearless leader Mark Goren for pointing me to this one.

chacha.com: My favorite of all these mentioned. Can’t find the results you want? Just click on “ask a guide” and an actual real person will search for you. Of course, when I first checked out this site, you didn’t have to register, but now you do—still, it’s a great service.

ask.com: Oh sure, I know, I know, askjeeves.com has been around forever. And at first I wrote off their recent makeover. But their new movement-generating advertising (the UK campaign, that is) and enhanced site and search functionality has gotten me, a Google addict, to switch on more than one searching occasion.

Remember the good old days of the internet? When you turned someone onto this bare-bones search engine, Google, that only the “in-the-know” were using? In those days, Google was a breath of fresh air compared to the noise on the other big search engines like Yahoo, Excite and Lycos . (Nostalgic “how they looked then” links graciously provided by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.)

These new contenders really capture the spirit of what Google once was. Simple results, easy to use and definitely not evil. Well, not yet, anyways. And I think they are all hard at work at attacking what Google has become. These are just a handful of the new crop of search engines that represent the move from combing endless pages of search results to a new way of search that is a reflection of the state of online content today.

So while Google now searches the universe itself, let’s all stay here at our computer screens and dare to search differently. The movement against the great search goliath has begun!