Web search is currently dominated by Google, which recently captured around 68% of the U.S. search engine market share.  Beyond Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, there are several other search engine companies that are attempting to produce innovative search engine functionality that may be of interest to online researchers.

Here is a quick rundown of several “alternative” search engines, including PreCYdent, a free legal research search engine:

PreCYdent
PreCYdent is a free legal search engine in “Beta” release (still under development).  PreCYdent is ambitiously designed for several legal research tasks, as revealed through links above the search bar on the main search pages: searching through opinions, statutes, and GPO documents (the Opinions, Statutes, and GPO links), searching for lawyers (the Find Lawyers link), searching through PreCYdent and user-submitted documents (the Uploaded Documents link), and searching through links to legal information blogs and websites (the Links link).

Currently there are some quirks to work out in the system.  It’s difficult to get a quick idea of the coverage of the materials--on the Opinions search page there is a link to the right of the search box labeled “Our Database,” which when clicked brings up a window describing PreCYdent’s coverage of judicial opinions.  However, the Statutes and GPO pages seem to be lacking links with similar descriptions.  

Another quirk is that on the main search pages for each type of search there is a spare search box and two buttons, “Search” and either “More Options” or “Jurisdictions and Options.”  The "More Options" or "Jurisdictions and Options" buttons may get overlooked due to their placement where the "cancel" button is usually placed on Windows prompts, and where the not-often-used "I'm Lucky" button is placed on Google search pages.  However, users probably won’t really get an idea of the possible usefulness of PreCYdent searches they click on the “More Options” or “Jurisdictions and Options” buttons, and also from there click on the “Boolean Searches” link; it can take a bit of digging around to find out how to perform any detailed or useful searches such as proximity searches and to take advantage of other useful options.

There are also new citator functions in PreCYdent, which have been reviewed by Bonnie Shucha of the University of Wisconsin Law Library on her WisBlawg blog.  As with finding coverage of the databases and finding information on advanced search options and Boolean searches, it takes a bit of digging around to find the citator options.  Luckily Ms. Shucha provides a picture with the citator icons circled in her review, as the citator functions otherwise would have been hard to find; some text labels for the citator icons that don’t require the user to mouse-over the icons might make it easier for users to find the citators functions.

For other free legal research sites, see the Public Library of Law and AltLaw.

Exalead is a search engine that is part of Quaero, a European search technology initiative.  What is notable about Exalead as a free web search engine is its many powerful advanced search features available, such as use of proximity search, wildcards, and regular expressions, which are not available on many other free web search engines such as Google and Yahoo.  While Google may get you great general search results, when you need to created more precise searches than Google allows, Exalead may be worth checking out.

Addictomatic
Addictomatic is designed as a “metasearch” search engine, pulling in information from “the "best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images."  Interestingly, some of the best available sources are not set as defaults; users may want to click on the “Available sources” link which appears once an initial search has been performed, and click on the checkboxes for Google News, Yahoo News, Icerocket, and perhaps other options in order to search through a more well-rounded set of information sources.  

Overall, Addictomatic seems unimpressive; there are currently not a very large number of information sources to choose from, and every time a new search is performed, Addictomatic does not seem to keep track of the sources previously selected in the “Available sources” list.  As Google continues to improve its “universal search” features, searching through blogs, news sites, and video sites like YouTube all from the standard Google search box, and with the availability of the iGoogle start page and and Google Reader applications, the usefulness of Addictomatic may not be apparent unless its features are widely improved and expanded upon.

More on the future of web browsing and web search:

There is an article published this month entitled Rummaging Through the Internet (on the Economist magazine’s website and in the print edition) which discusses next-generation web search and web browsing research, including the concept of 3D browsing, a browser add-on named Hyperwords (here are some Hyperwords reviews), and other innovations.