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Although Google sits atop the search engine heap with a commanding 60%+ of market share, there continues to be a steady stream of new contenders looking for a way to conduct searches and/or present search results in some novel way that might catch on with users and begin to chip away at Google's hegemony.

The name of the game is Semantic Search, which is often described as the most salient characteristic of the not-quite-here-yet Web 3.0. Semantic searches support "natural language" queries, as opposed to keyword queries. It is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing, and combining information on the Web.

This is certainly a viable strategy, as long as the novelty creates a useful and user-friendly service that somehow enhances or augments what is offered by Google's search.

Two of the following three recent entries into the search field — Microsoft's Bing and Wolfram|Alpha — are positioning themselves as natural-language search engines, although Wolfram|Alpha is much more the real deal than is Bing which basically bolted on some features of Powerset to provide a bit of semantic search although it really just pulls from Wikipedia.

Billed as a "decision engine," Bing, which became available to the public on May 28, 2009, presents search results in a visually organized manner that has garnered it some positive reviews. Its graphics-dominated home page --  the very antithesis of Google's clean no-BS look -- is to my taste a bit, um, overcooked and visually unappealing (very 1990s --  hard to imagine how it got approved!), but the search results are organized well and, thankfully, the SERPs are much cleaner in presentation. However, in terms of relevant search results, the consensus seems to be that Google still rules. However, Bing did quickly double Microsoft's search marketshare in its first couple weeks, so it'll be interesting to see how it fairs as its results and features improve and evolve and after its novelty fades.

Another recent search engine is Wolfram|Alpha which bills itself as a "computational knowledge engine" and was rolled out to the public on May 15, 2009. Based on the work of Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram|Alpha is not, as a ReadWriteWeb Blog posts warns, a general purpose search engine. As the Wikipedia entry describes it

It is an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine might.

And this article describes it:

Search engines still matter, but Wolfram Alpha (www.wolframalpha.com) hopes to shift us toward a "finding engine" that uses Web 3.0 principles to deliver information from natural language queries. Wolfram Alpha is the latest big project from Wolfram Research, Inc. Marketed as a computational knowledge engine, it boils down to being a really smart way to access most of the best reference shelves on the planet. Think about it as a library minus the disdain for skateboarders plus Wolfram's Mathematica program powering the world's biggest online scientific calculator.

Wolfram|Alpha's strength is in the computation area — excelling in information that can be packed into data snippets (height of a mountain, chemical formulas, population stats, stars, planets, etc.): math problems, word puzzles, statistics. But a "Google Killer" it's not, and really doesn't purport to be.

Spezify is a new search engine with a unique graphical interface, and driven by Flash, that has just come out of beta, as of June 15, 2009.

I did some searches on Spezify and I have to admit that the presentation of "hits" is quite unique, with different sources (MSN Live search, Yahoo, Amazon, Twitter and Ebay, Facebook, Linkedin, etc.) aggregated and each source represented by a different graphic.  For instance, Twitter results are represented by a speech bubble, and other sources are branded in the top left with their logo/icon.

Here's how Spezify characterizes their search engine:

We take web search further, away from endless lists of blue text links and towards a more intuitive experience.
We want you to get a good overview of a subject,
find useful information and be inspired with Spezify.

We mix all media types and make no difference
between blogs, videos, microblogs and images.
Everything communicates and helps building the bigger picture.

We collect websites and are aiming to use as many relevant, free and open API's as possible to generate extensive and diverse search results.

Spezify was developed by Felix af Ekenstam and Per Persson, of Stockholm Sweden.

They don't identify from which search engines they pull their results.

Unfortunately, Spezify is a bit counter-intuitive, because each box when moused over pops the "link finger" the only clicking that works is on the visible URLs. This sort of makes sense, but I think it might be confusing to users. Also, it takes a very long time for all their results to load, minutes in some cases.

It will be interesting to watch this Swedish search engine evolve.