Quotes of the Day

Not so very long ago, at the turn of the century, Google went from an obscure start-up to the Web's dominant search engine. It accomplished this feat in remarkably little time by being vastly better than established contenders like AltaVista. And Google has stayed on top ever since, the beneficiary of both its own never-ending efforts at self-improvement and the fact that humans are creatures of habit. In the U.S., Google currently gets nearly twice as many searches as all of its competitors combined.

Over the years, plenty of companies have labored to put a dent in that massive market share. Recently, however, a couple of Google's rivals — Yahoo! and Ask.com (née Ask Jeeves) — have waved white flags. In August, Yahoo! started delivering search results based on Microsoft's Bing. Then last week Ask.com announced that it would focus on its question-and-answer feature, outsourcing search to an unspecified third party.

I find these developments disheartening, even though I cheerfully admit to being a member of the Google-using majority. History keeps showing that enormously successful tech companies grow fat and complacent unless they face real competition. So I want the search wars to rage on even if the category has only one true superpower.

That means I'm paying close attention to Microsoft, the last major Google competitor that sees search as a smart investment rather than a fool's errand. Since relaunching its Live Search last year as the more peppily named Bing, it has signed that deal with Yahoo! and pumped resources into improving and promoting its offering. Most important, it has managed to give Bing something few Google alternatives have ever had: a distinct identity.

Whereas Google is famous for a home page that's mostly white space, Bing's trademark is a fancy photographic backdrop. Google responds to every query on any subject with a list of links to other sites; Bing uses a "decision engine" that has some features tailored to specific topics, such as travel, health and shopping, and sometimes provides information about those things right on the site rather than suggesting where to look elsewhere. (Its travel section is particularly rich, with features like advice on whether it's smartest to buy a plane ticket immediately or to wait for prices to drop.) And while Google and Facebook are squabbling, Microsoft has worked with Facebook (of which it owns a small chunk) to let Bing users see recommendations from their friends within search results.

Nimble, inventive and extremely well financed, Bing is the sort of search engine you would invent if your goal was to keep Google on its toes. And Google does seem to be paying attention. After years of making only subtle tweaks to its results pages, it has spent much of 2010 rolling out changes that are impossible to miss. In May, it added a Bing-like left sidebar of options. September brought Google Instant, which starts displaying links without waiting for you to finish typing. And instant previews — pop-up thumbnail images that let you peek at pages before you leave the results page — showed up last week.

Google's single biggest defense against Bing isn't anything new and splashy, though. It's the fact that it's still better at the basic job of responding to queries with a list of the most relevant sites, ranked in the most logical order. When I search for "Canon S95," for instance, it's smart enough to make its top listing a link to Canon's page for its PowerShot S95 camera. On Bing, that page is the second result — the first one is an obscure site that mentions the S95 only in passing. Gaffes like that leave me using Bing as a supplement to Google rather than a replacement for it.

Of course, Microsoft has the wherewithal to go on refining its search engine indefinitely if it chooses. Start-up companies don't have that luxury, and more than one has proven that targeting Google is a little like opening a hamburger stand with the express goal of shattering the McDonald's hegemony. (In Silicon Valley, one failed would-be Google killer, Cuil, is practically synonymous with overweening ambition.)

The founders of a new site called Blekko wisely deny that they're out to crush Google. But their service — slightly unappetizing name and all — sports the freshest approach of any all-new search engine to come along in quite a while. The big idea behind Blekko, which launched on Halloween, is the slashtag, a keyword you append to your query to restrict the search to a specific list of sites — ones with reputable information about a particular topic, for instance, or those of a particular political bent or specialists in a particular type of content like video.

Searching Blekko for "california /news," for instance, pulls up different links from those found with "california /travel." Likewise, entering "glenn beck /conservative" or "glenn beck /liberal" will get you wildly varying results. And when you don't include a slashtag, the engine aims to put the most trustworthy sources up highest on the list. Search for "lung cancer," for example, and you'll get links to the National Institute of Health, WebMD, and the American Medical Association.

The niftiest thing about slashtags is that they're not the result of Google-like automation. Instead, Blekko is taking a Wikipedia-style approach, letting its users create and edit tags. The results are still rough — my search results on Blekko are too often thick with stale links rather than up-to-the-minute stuff — but the idea is bursting with potential. (I didn't use Wikipedia a couple of weeks after it launched in 2001, but I'll bet it was a tad spotty then too.)

Google may be a behemoth, but its market share is more fragile than you would think. There's absolutely nothing stopping you from immediately dumping one search engine for a superior competitor — hey, just ask AltaVista. And even if you go back to Google again and again, as most of us do, it's reassuring to know that alternatives such as Bing and Blekko are out there.

McCracken blogs about personal technology at Technologizer, which he founded in 2008 after nearly two decades as a tech journalist. His column for TIME.com, also called Technologizer, appears every Tuesday.

• Harry McCracken
• With some search companies calling it quits, Microsoft's Bing and a new contender named Blekko give Google much-needed competition