Alternative search engines and the "subjective Web"

The history of Internet led us through roughly 6 different stages reflected by the contents found in the World Wide Web:

* 1993-1995: most of the content to be found in the Web was from universitarian and scientific origin,
* 1995-1997: then came the era of personal webpages indexed by the first portals and search engines,
* 1997-1999: corporate websites and webmerchants started to flourish,
* 1999-2001: press media went totally online. Other media (TV, radio) were condemned to stay off-line because of the weakness of the bandwidth!

Then came a technological leap: broadband...

* 2001-2006: during this period the Web became suddenly richer (rich media) and more participative allowing multimedia files to be delivered and exchanged online. Blogs appeared, MP3 music systems like Napster paved the way with Peer-to-Peer systems. Immediately followed by video online sharing systems and voice over the net. The Web 2.0 was born making it possible for everyone to become a consumer and a producer of the content.
* 2007: this date is crucial since it marks the upcoming of virtual life and mobile and Internet convergence.

Gigantic and incumbent search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN due to their longevity encompassed all these periods and therefore succeeded in indexing all kind of contents in their databases.

This enormous accumulation of content by the leading search systems during the web evolution can be considered as an asset in regard with the vast choice of sources offered to the users.

But it is not really! Historical search systems are overwhelmed by too much "noise" content making it difficult to find straightforward relevant content. Their links databases are spoiled with too many obsolete and commercial content making it hard to bring satisfaction to the users.

Moreover, the fact that their ranking models are all based on popularity (sometimes dubbed as "authority") makes their indices not very dynamical. Popular web sources are almost on top and new sources have to struggle in order to get to the the first results pages.

It is not a lie to say that if the users use only one search engine they miss much of the reality of today's web.

Things must now change as the users become more aware! The users should consider specializing their search operations.

To do this, a new generation of search engines is emerging on the market. These niche search engines are the "alternative search engines".

Each alternative system has its own speciality and positionning. Some are dedicated to the retrieval of images, other to blogs, still others to given topics and type of content. Some of them carry out this task in an extremely creative way thanks to smart interfaces enhanced by the Ajax language. Some are real AI tools.

If you wish to discover all the richness of the alternative search engines, we invite you to read the excellent www.altsearchengines.com, a blog from the ReadWriteWeb network specially dedicated to these new generation search engines. This blog is thoroughly animated and sourced by Charles Knight who scans the whole Internet on a daily basis to find and present new alternative search engines.

www.blogdimension.com also belongs to this breed of alternative search engines. It proposes a totally new way of addressing the usage of online search activities.

Blogdimension focuses exclusively on Web 2.0 content like blogs, microblogs, forums, online media, images derived from these sources, audio files & podcasts, videos. Generally speaking, Blogdimension retrieves syndicated (RSS) and user generated content only. In the contrary of all the big ones, Blogdimension.com does not give access to any general, encyclopedic or commercial web eventhough one can find such content also in our search engine incidentally.

By such a positionning, Blogdimension appears as a complementary tool to the incumbent search engines represented by the trio Google-Yahoo-MSN (Live.com). Blogdimension exists in English, French, Spanish, Chinese and soon in Japanese, Portuguese and Russian. Other great languages are in progress.

Said in a different way, Blogdimension gives access to the subjective part of the web. To the web made of opinions and viewpoints (blogs, forums, videos). This viral and unconventional part of the web which expresses individual thoughts, anger and passion. In other words the free web!

It is time to use several search engines to discover the still new unexplored dimensions of the World Wide Web!