If you started a search site in direct competion against Google, how would you win.?

[UnGxxgle]

We ownan UnGoogle site and wish to gain some of Gxxgle's 42% internet share but have no budget. How would you start?

[James B]

Make a better search engine that works better and is more effective at directing you to the correct content.
Better algorithms and intelligent search results.

If you have a better product you will get the traffic simple as that.

[Menaal]

yea as he said....if you have been searching trough many search sites, you may find out that for a thing 1 of the sites can search better than others and for the other thing, the other one can search better than that(for example some times yahoo searches better than google,and some times google can search better than yahoo)...so its like chance....
if you make a search site that can access directly to the head site and always access to it, then your search site is populated !!!

[Joe Finkle]

Here's a couple of things you should keep in mind:
1) If you run an advertising supported business (like a search engine), and it can't survive without heavy advertising, it can't survive. This is what caused the tech bubble, advertising supported sites that advertised on advertising supported sites that advertised on advertising supported sites, etc., etc., etc. There ultimately wasn't enough product to bring money into the whole pyramid and it all came down, best exemplified by Pets.com. Only Google and a few other top content sites managed to survive using advertising as their sole base.

That's not to say you can't do some advertising to start, just don't rely on it long-term. Look at Bing, for example. They managed to get a small but significant wedge into the market through advertising, though I imagine they probably would have captured a similar market share without doing that based solely on the free press involved in a major Microsoft endeavor.

2) The market for search engines is not an area that sparks much antitrust concern and for good reason. There is nothing to stop people from going over from Google to Yahoo to your site, or anything else. That means that if you truly built a better search engine and can get some word out about it, it will catch on and people will use it. Look at another start-up, Wolfram Alpha. They are the top search site for the deep web, a small niche that Google can't currently fill, but they've caught on for people needing that capability. (Although they still have a long way to go to get a good deep web search.)

3) If you built a better search engine than Google, you should know the internet and SEO far better than anyone on Yahoo. The fact that you're asking this question tends to make me doubt your claim, but it's an interesting question regardless. To market that capability, you should take advantage of the tremendous network of free media Make YouTube (owned by Google, ironically) videos showing your capabilities stacked up against Googles. Use a tag line like "The results speak for themselves" or something catchy that will get people looking at you as a Google alternative. Use Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. Start a blog. Make a wikipedia page. And when you post something about your site on a place like Yahoo Answers, mention the name of your service and provide a link.

4) Build professional contacts that can help you break in to major markets. Contact browser companies about having your engine included in their standard list of default search providers. Start with Firefox, Safari, and Opera since none of them also own a search engine. Among the several major antitrust cases against Microsoft is one that found that they could discriminate among search providers in their browser, which is why there are options in browsers for the default search provider. If you gain some serious traction, even IE and Chrome will list your engine as an option to compete with their affiliated engines, Bing and Google.

You should also contact news media. Look into Rick Sanchez on CNN and other technophiles on TV. See if you can get CNET to review your service and the New York Times weekly tech review in the business section.


BOTTOM LINE:
You say you built a better search engine. That's how Google topped Altavista and other giants of the early web. Now you need to back up your claim. If you can't do that, you'll get nowhere.