Is search about to experience a "riot"

Alta Vista, Excite, Infoseek, Ask Jeeves - do any of these ring a bell?  The back alleys of Silicon Valley are littered with the corpses of search engines that couldn't. Google has beaten most of these names into the annals of history.  Only Yahoo and Microsoft (with their deep pockets) still put up some token resistance to the Borg-Google collective. Why? Do we like the Google color schemes?  Do the double "0s" get us.  Do we like the idea of advertiser based searching?  No, No and no.  We use Google because more than any other search engine out there, when we want to find something, Google finds it for us.  The algorithms and intelligence Google uses results in what we are looking for.  Forget Android, Google Apps, Google Maps and all of that other stuff, we use Google because their search renders the most relevant results.

Could there by a new player on the horizon that that gives us more relevant results?  Could there be a "riot" in the search arena?  If you believe what the folks at OneRiot say, there very well could be. In an age of social networking, this is a social search engine.  OneRiot gives you search results not based upon how many links are there to that page.  The results you get are based upon the popularity of those pages as measured by people on the net.  This should result in links not to the wikipedia page, but to pages that real people look at when looking for a particular keyword.  This could be the key to breaking out of the collective. To paraphrase what Jon Landau once said about Bruce Springsteen, I have seen the future of Internet search and its name is OneRiot.

Besides the search OneRiot plays on its social media roots and has some really great add ons.  There are plug ins for my space (why no facebook guys?), twitter, web slices for IE8, etc.  Check them out.  Also you can make their searches better by installing their pulse checker.

OneRiot is based in Boulder, Co and in full disclosure I have some friends who work there.  But don't let that hold you back.  Go check out OneRiot and see for yourself that there can be more to search than being another drone of the collective.