Vote In CNETs Webware 100

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, April 11, 2009 Comments (4)

CNET is sponsoring a contest called Webware 100. The idea is to choose 100 Web 2.0 websites that are the best websites on the Web, selected of course by voters (you and me). Webware 100 is split up into several categories, but the one I’d like to have a discussion on today is search. Here are the categories in the contest:

• Audio & Music
• Browsing
• Commerce
• Communication
• Infrastructure & Storage
• Location-based Services
• Photo & Video
• Productivity
• Search & Reference
• Social Networking & Publishing

This isn’t the first time CNET has sponsored this competition, but the location-based services category is in its first year. It’s also important to point out that the category I’ll discuss in a moment is the Search & Reference category. Among the sites included in this category are reference sites like About.com and Wikipedia (and its lesser known competitor Citizendium). I’m less concerned about them.

In the search category are several search engines and this is the part that I’m most interested in. The search engines represented are:

• Ask
• Delver
• Evri (ever heard of it?)
• Google (of course)
• Hakia
• Inquisitor
• Live Search
• Mahalo
• Scour
• SearchMe
• Twitter Search
• Wink
• Yahoo! Search

Now my observations:

It may seem ridiculous that any search engine other than Google is on this list since the Big G is the most popular search engine online. You would think that the search engine that enjoys 70+ percent of the market in its niche would be a hands-down winner, right? Not necessarily. Keep in mind that this is a CNET contest so it will be limited to people who read that magazine online, mostly techies.

Another thing that shouldn’t go unmentioned is the description of Yahoo! Search says it is the second most popular search engine in the world. It’s not. YouTube is. And by the way, where is YouTube? It’s listed in the Photo & Video category. I’d like to also see it listed in the Search & Reference category since it is does include a search engine as a part of the service.

So, on to meatier topics….

If I were to select a non-Google property to vote on here it would be one of two properties – either Twitter Search or Mahalo. Twitter because it’s introduced real-time search functionality, which is perhaps the most important new development in search (even better than semantic search, which no one seems to be getting right). And Mahalo for one simple reason: People actually visit websites from this search engine.

Unlike many Google competitors not in the top 4, Mahalo actually delivers traffic (quality traffic even) to websites and there seems to be a commitment to actually creating a search engine that helps people rather than a gizmo with cool features. The fact that the search results are created by humans rather than robots or scripts might have something to do with that.

If it isn’t Twitter Search or Mahalo then I’d say the Search category still belongs to Google – unless one of the reference sites in that category (not Wikipedia) can out-function it.

If interested in voting in the CNET Webware 100 (and not just the Search & Reference category then visit CNET and start voting.

Comments (4)                      Category: Search Engines                      

Read similar posts in Search Engines

• Bing Gets Serious About Link Building
• Google Predictions Video by Matt Cutts
• The State of Google's Index
• Is Google Quietly Tweaking Local Search
• Are You Ready For Some Caffeine?

Subscribe to our RSS feed