The search engine industry is highly competitive and the big players have enormous amounts of money available for research. Still, there is a lot of search engine innovation going on outside of Yahoo, Microsoft and Google — so much in fact, that it can be hard to keep up.

Don’t worry, though. Charles Knight is keeping an eye on search engine innovation, processing the huge amounts of information and presenting the essence.

Top 100 alternative search engines
On the first day of the new year, I got an email from Knight, containing a list of the top 100 alternative search engines. I had a look at his list (which at this point was an Excel sheet) and was quite impressed. It contained lots of search engines I had never heard of, and many of them were innovative and interesting.

My ambition was to visit all 100 and write an article highlighting the very best ones and the most interesting categories. But 100 search engines were too much, even for my appetite, and the article never happened.

Not at Pandia, at least, but Charles Knight must have seen the need to accompany his list with some analysis. He now posts a monthly round-up of the top 100 alternative search engines over at Read/Write Web.

The list in itself is not the real news, even though I wouldn’t be surprised if in time it turned into a kind of search engine innovation barometer. But at the moment, the criteria for inclusion are subjective. What you get are the favourites of Charles Knight. The analysis that surround the list s far more interesting.

This month’s article contains a “What’s new” section, which is helpful for returning readers. Knight also works at categorizing the search engines, and this provides a kind of filter which is useful. In stead of sifting through 100 search engines, you can go directly to the category that interests you the most.

Search engine of the month
A large part of each month’s article is devoted to the search engine of the month. This is a detailed presentation of a search engine that is especially impressive or innovative.

This month’s favorite is the brand new KoolTorch, with a patented design that allows you to see 10, 50, even 100 search results all at once – all on one page. Knight writes:

Each colored wheel lets you drill down into a category, or you can “mouse over” the bubbles to see a miniature preview of the web page itself! When you mouse over the word in the center oval, you receive still more information – the subcategories below that circle – all without leaving the first page!

I have not tested KoolTorch — it doesn’t work on my Mac, nor does it work on Firefox for PC (although they are apparently working to fix that problem). From the screen shots it looks like an alternative, visual clustering presentation of search results.