New alternatives to Google

NY Times:

In brand-new offices with a still-empty game room and enough space to triple their staff of nearly 30, a trio of entrepreneurs is leading an Internet start-up with an improbable mission: to out- Google Google.

The three started Powerset, a company whose aim is to deliver better answers than any other search engine — including Google — by letting users type questions in plain English. And they have made believers of Silicon Valley investors whose fortunes turn on identifying the next big thing.

“There’s definitely a segment of the market that thinks we are crazy,” said Charles Moldow, a partner at Foundation Capital, a venture capital firm that is Powerset’s principal financial backer. “In 2000, some people thought Google was crazy.”

Powerset is hardly alone. Even as Google continues to outmaneuver its main search rivals, Yahoo and Microsoft, plenty of newcomers — with names like hakia, ChaCha and Snap — are trying to beat the company at its own game. And Wikia Inc., a company started by a founder of Wikipedia, plans to develop a search engine that, like the popular Web-based encyclopedia, would be built by a community of programmers and users.

...


There is more. You can find them by doing a Google search, of course. Actually they are all pretty good. Snap also has the "sneak preview" feature that I have added to links on this blog. Let me know what you think of it. I am not sure how practical it is, but it does look pretty cool.

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