PARIS: Does the world need another Google? Naima and Daniel Moore, a husband-and-wife team based in Atlanta, believe it does. On Monday, they unveiled Megaglobe, an international search engine that comes in 45 languages whose claim to fame is that it is designed to fight "click fraud," where advertisers get ripped off when hits on their ads are not from genuine consumers.
The fraud-fighting mechanisms are under the hood at Megaglobe, hidden from the average searcher. What you see at the site instead is a strong resemblance to Google, the world's dominant search engine, including the plain home page, the typeface and the way the search results are displayed.
But Daniel Moore, the company's chief financial officer, said Megaglobe has no false pretentions.
"We're not trying to be Google," he said in an interview in Paris, where the couple introduced their business. (Naima, Megaglobe's president, is French).
"We're not trying to get the entire market - we'll get our 1 percent, 2 percent share. But look at the fast-food industry - McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King. In the search industry, you need options," he added.
For those of us stuck in the rut of Googling everything we need to know online, there is no shortage of options. To find them, just type "search engines" into, um, Google.
Or you can browse Search Engine Watch, the granddaddy of the Web sites that follow this corner of the Internet - it started in 1996. SEW, as it is known, lists countless search services in various specialty categories, including news, shopping, image, audio, video and kids (see (searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=links). It even lists blasts from the past, "Search Engines We've Known and Loved," like one of my old favorites, Magellan.
More fun is www.altsearchengines.com, which each month arbitrarily compiles a list of the "top" 100 alternative search engines. The most recent top service was Dialogus.ru, which in English or Russian searches for answers to user's questions, like, "How much does a cottonwood tree grow per year?"
Altsearchengines also gives a nod to Quintura Kids (kids.quintura.com), which likewise has a Russian connection but operates in English. It is a refreshing, entertaining and safe - at least in theory - search service for kids. If you search for "fisheye," for example, you get just one result, but it is a gem: the Fisheye View Cam that gives views of coral reefs and fish at www.FisheyeView.com.
Another family-friendly site, Picsearch, based in Stockholm, is strictly for images and other non-text multimedia. Its most popular image searches of the week as of Wednesday were Rihanna, the Transformers, Bruce Willis and the Sydney Opera House.
Then there are the search engines that are not search engines. Technorati, which was started to monitor the blogosphere, in May introduced an "integrated search" that includes Flickr photos, YouTube videos, music, podcasts, events and blog posts all on one page.
Technorati maintains that even though Google's new Universal Search does much the same thing with a vaster index of Web content, Technorati's search is "platform agnostic and pulls from all social media sites," providing an up-to-the-minute snapshot of online chatter.
The four most widely used search engines - Google (55 percent), Yahoo (22 percent), MSN (9 percent) and AOL (5.4 percent), all according to Nielsen/Net Ratings) - don't leave a lot of market share for the specialty sites.
But they are there. It will take you some time, effort and experimentation to check them out, bookmark them - and then resolve to use them regularly. Google, by building itself into some of the world's most widely used Internet browser software, has certainly made it easy to be the default search engine, and our inertia lets us keep it there.
Not that Google is the bad guy, or at least it is no more evil than Microsoft. Google is a terrific search engine that often gives me what I'm looking for on the first or second try. But as Moore of Megaglobe said, we need options. Any company that dominates its field would benefit from some old-fashioned, upstart competition.