The Library House blog has done
a geographic analysis of Charles Knight’s Top
100 Alternative Search Engines list. After a bit of Web research, Library House was
able to find out where 94 of the 100 search engines in our list are located. The result
is that the US, and California in particular, is the place to be to develop a
ground-breaking search engine – with 25 of the 94 search engines coming from California.
Perhaps unsurprising, but it does prove that Silicon Valley is still the center of search
engine innovation at
least.
Library House came up with this very nice tag cloud, showing the results:
All up, there are 17 countries and 15 US states represented in the list. France
and the UK are the next best represented countries, with 7 and 6 alt search engines
respectively.
I wonder if Library House would let us know the 6 search engines they couldn’t locate,
as I’m sure the ‘wisdom of crowds’ can figure their locations out (i.e. in the comments
here).
On the topic of alt search engine list mashups, Don Dodge also wrote a
great post attempting to categorize the list. If anyone knows of other ways to mashup
the list, let us know – don’t forget there’s also an excel spreadsheet
version available.