Smart mini-search engines are trying to carve out a new niche

Many smart, albeit ‘small-scale’ search engines are trying to carve out a new niche for themselves. Realizing that it is futile to take on Google and other top search engines, entities like Kosmix and Powerset are treading off-beat paths.
Kosmix smartly combines results thrown by other search engines. Its computers in response to a topic search create a page full of information automatically pulled from websites like YouTube and Wikipedia, as well as blogs, Twitter feeds and more sources.

According to Kosmix’s co-founder Venky Harinarayan, their computers comb through over 10,000 websites and applications. For instance, if you want to research a trip to Hawaii, it can find you various opinions and ideas from Twitter, a guide on Mahalo and also the latest images from Flickr, all of which is then displayed on one page ordered by relevance and importance.

These are all new mini-search engines that still form a very tiny part of the global search market. They are estimated to draw less than mere 2% of total search traffic worldwide. However, their relevance is underlined by a recent report from Web traffic monitor Hitwise. According to their estimates, these mini-search engines are growing rapidly. Kosmix has witnessed its market-share increase by 730% year-over-year, whereas traffic is almost double on Microsoft owned Powerset from that of a year ago.