Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

A surprise from a recent "Focus Group" by About.com was the that meta search engine Vivisimo came out tied for second place among users. Keep in mind that most of these users hadn't heard of Vivisimo before the focus group, but after experimenting with it, people fell in love with the features offered by this up-and-coming search engine. Meta search engine Dogpile.com also got good ratings, coming in at 6th place.

I remember trying Vivisimo out a couple years ago. I thought the clustering was very cool. They've got a bunch more cool features now, including an enhanced Ebay Search - very cool. If you've never tried Vivisimo, you should give it a shot. If it's been a while, you should go back and try it again for the first time.

I think it's good to get some "new blood" in the search engine race. The sad truth, however, is that even though these meta search engine provide relevant results and useful functionality, nobody's using them (relatively speaking, of course). There seems to be this perception that Google is the end all be all for search. Don't get me wrong, I use Google all the time, I just think it's healthy for the industry to have several strong players (more than 3, I mean). Hopefully Vivisimo and some of these other search engines can catch on and build up a loyal following because of the quality of their technology. Sounds a lot like what Google did, what do you think?