Top 5 Google Killer – That didn’t

Google began as a project headed by Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Their goal was to create the most powerful, accurate and comprehensive search engine on the Web. Their hard work paid off -- today, many people refer to the act of performing a Web search as "googling."
But Google isn't the only search engine game in town. Several companies and developers have created Web search tools. Some have even admitted to setting their sights on Google. We'll look at five Web products that journalists have described as Google killers.

5. Wikia Search
A wiki is a site that uses a special kind of software that makes it easy for people to create and edit collaborative Web pages. The most famous wiki on the Web is Wikipedia, the collaborative encyclopedia. One of the co-founders of Wikipedia is Jimmy Wales. Wales saw the success of collaborative work on the Web -- often called crowdsourcing -- and decided to apply that approach to search. That's how Wikia Search was born.
Wales hoped to create a search engine that harnessed the power of collaboration to produce the best, most relevant search results on the Web. Ideally, the collaborative process would be transparent and it would be hard for companies to game the system. Any registered user would be able to see who had made changes to search results pages and intervene if necessary.
In March 2009, Wales announced that his company was discontinuing the Wikia Search project indefinitely. The economic recession had hit the tech industry hard. As a result, there just wasn't enough money in the budget to support the development of Wikia Search. But we may still see the search engine resurface in the future.
4. Cuil
In the summer of 2008, a new search engine emerged onto the scene and began to make headlines. Headed by Web veterans -- including former Google employees -- this new search engine seemed poised to take on Google in a head-to-head competition. The engine's name was Cuil -- pronounced "cool."
Cuil takes a different approach to searching and ranking Web sites. Google's strategy is to search sites for keywords and then rank the sites based upon popularity. The more popular a Web site is, the higher it will rank on a Google results page. The philosophy behind this approach is pretty simple: If a lot of people link to a page, it must be pretty good.
Cuil attempts to rank pages not based upon popularity but by relevance. The search engine crawls through Web pages looking for keywords and searches for context. It looks not just for the phrase or word you search for but also the rest of the content on the page. Theoretically, you should receive results that are most relevant to your query.
The problem was that Cuil didn't quite live up to user expectations when it launched. And while Cuil is still around, it hasn't been able to wrest away the search engine crown from Google.
3. WolframAlpha
Sometimes tech journalists will call a new service a Google killer even when it's not a search engine. That's the case with WolframAlpha. It's easy to confuse WolframAlpha with a search engine. It has a field into which you type a query and it searches its database for answers. But that's where the similarity ends.
Search engines provide users links to Web sites that presumably hold information the user wants. WolframAlpha consults an enormous database to bring data directly to the user. You won't receive a list of links when you execute a query on WolframAlpha. Instead, you'll be greeted with charts and graphs populated with data related to the keywords you entered.
Because WolframAlpha pulls back data rather than links, it's not in direct competition with Google.
2. Bing
Out of all of Google's potential rivals, one stands above all others: Microsoft. As Google tries to edge into Microsoft's territory with products like Google Docs, Microsoft is doing the same thing to Google through search.
Microsoft has offered Web search engines under several names. The latest incarnation is called Bing. Bing has a snazzy interface and a simple navigation menu. You can search for Web site results, images, video, news and more. While Google search offers similar services, Bing's presentation has more style.
Bing enjoyed a big spike in user activity shortly after it debuted. Journalists remarked on the search result quality, particularly for images and videos. But later reports suggested that Bing's surge in popularity was short-lived. It appears that users just need search to be "good enough" without any of the bells and whistles you find in Bing.
1. Twitter Search
Twitter is the messaging service that spans across cell phones and the Web. One of the more useful Twitter applications is Twitter Search. Type a keyword into Twitter Search right from the Twitter home page and you'll see the most recent public tweets that contain that keyword. You can take the pulse of the Twitter audience instantly. A quick glance at the time stamp on each tweet tells you if the topic you're searching for is generating a lot of interest or is dead in the water.
And Twitter Search results update as you plow through them, while Google search results take more time to update. But Twitter limits messages to 140 characters in length. Most of the time, you'll find more helpful information using Google. Exceptions include breaking news or tweets that contain links to sites that Google has yet to index.
There are lots of useful search engine tools on the Internet. Some of them even rival Google -- there might even be a few that are arguably better at returning searches than Google. But it looks like it's going to take more than a good search results page to topple this Goliath.