Google might seem to have an unpenetrable domination of the internet search market with a string of competitors such as AltaVista, Magellan, Infoseek now apparently lying in the dust. But perhaps the search engine market is more contestable than we might assume?

The Telegraph today had a feature on some of the niche search engines working away behind the scenes to scratch away at the monopolistic power of Google. Many of these new players are focusing their attention on providing specialist search services for large corporations, improving the quality and speed of information flows for searches within internet networks. Some of the next generation of search engines are trying to harness the power of open source and internet communities to speed up the development of technologies that dig even deeper into the content genres of the internet - as the Telegraph report argues, “the prize now is to devise engines that can handle clearly defined tasks -such as finding video, or MP3 music files, or the best blogs - more effectively.”

Read “Google: Seven potential threats to its dominance”

A couple of examples from Blinx.com

Videos on the credit crunch and the UK economy

Tim Harford

Carbon trading