I stumbled on a news piece the other day looking for alternatives to the Google search engine.

A few of the products were quite ingenious, such as a Finding Dulcinea.com, where web editors actually search for the best web sites to visit in order to answer questions and only give you the best twenty results…it sort of reads like an encyclopedia of web browsing.

Another example is Cluuz.com which gives site searches based on symantics…it reads like a dictionary.

Finally, Cuil.com, which says it has access to more sites than Google. That may mean they turned some of the porn filters off, or it may mean that they are developing a site using fuzzy logic search rather than popularity metrics.

According to the site:

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

As it were, I’m just beginning to think that Google is nearing that place in their career where they may just be brushing up against outsider status.

With new companies beginning to find niches and developing ways to do things that are different than the preconceived, it’s only a matter of time before one or two make a break from the pack and try for a spot at the top.

Further, with Google breaking into markets such as Google Android, Google Doc, and Google Chrome, it’s not long to wait before we see an operating system with Googles name on it butting up against Windows and MacOS; vying for global supremacy. They have a few tickets for the big games now, and that’s just why Microsoft offed Netscape ten years ago.

I’m not saying that Google is Microsoft and that they’ve reached some pinnacle and are going to knock down anyone who climbs a bit too high. At this point they are noted for being the nicest kid on the playground, but it’s interesting to think that they might just have matured enough to be the elder statesman in the development community, and it should be fun to see how this progresses.