Who are the competitors of Google?

POPULARITY CONTEST
Many search technologies base their results on the popularity of a page, or how often it is linked to other pages on the Net. By contrast, Google, Teoma and Wisenut consider popularity but also rely on other factors and proprietary methods to determine the rank of a Web page in a given search.

Google’s system, called PageRank, identifies the link structure of the entire Web and ranks pages based partly on the number of other important pages linked to them and partly on popularity. The search algorithms themselves are closely guarded secrets, Google spokesman David Krane said. Google also taps Netscape’s Open Directory Project, an open-source directory of Web sites, for topic-based searches.

Teoma and Wisenut hope to convince Web surfers that their methodologies are even more effective. “What Teoma does that is different is that we crawl the Web and look at subject-specific topics. We are able to cluster the Web into communities and understand what are the most important pages in those communities and who the experts are in that community,” Teoma’s Gardi said. He says flatly that Teoma’s technology aces Google’s, even though it has yet to be fully launched.