Promising search engine?

Apart from the 3 main search engines, can ASK.com or any other search engine out there be considered a contender for the 4th position?

The market share as of July 2006 (it'll still be approximately the same):

Google - 49.2%
Yahoo - 23.8%
MSN - 9.6%
AOL - 6.3%
Ask - 2.6%

All others - 8.5%

So half of the world, according to the Nielsen search engine statistics, are searching using Google. A quarter are using Yahoo.

Google still have a fairly strong hold in this area.I wonder if this will ever change?

I'm sure it will, but it could be 30 or 40 years before a change. Google is like Microsoft, they are a giant in the internet industry, and it'll be hard to overtake them. I'm up for a challenge though

The google is the king among the SEs. But a new rising star has appeared on the horizont, called snap. I am not really satisfied with its searching algorith, and I think the number of indexed sites is still small. Otherwise it is spread on the Internet very fast, because of its usefull serviceses. More and more webmasters place its javascript code day by day. I think this was a really amazing business concept. There is no other way to spread a new SE, than this "viral" method.

Whats the chances of Microsoft getting into this market?
They have enough money and power to throw at it.
Could be interesting.

I didnt realise that microsoft was quite so far way down the list, wow less than 10% especially when you consider their home pahe is so many peoples default homepage.

I use Google, Everyone uses Google.

Apart from my dad, He doesn't use Google. But hey any forum you go to and ask a question.. What do they say?? "Google is your friend"

So it doesn't really surprise me Google owns over half the market.

Microsoft might gain some searchers with their new live search. Who knows, I doubt that they'll get much market gain though, not for quite some time. If there were a search engine that could separate the spam from the results page, and offer something new to the searcher, then it would be possible with enough support that it could take over Google.

I'm surprised googles percentage isn't higher than 49.2.

I don't think Ask.com would rise anytime soon. Google, Yahoo and MSN are all well established to be threatened by Ask.com.

I think that google is always going to dominate search engines, no matter what happens. Ask.com and others have no chance in front of google. According to me, if any search engine can compete with google in terms of quality of results, it can be only altavista.

AOL takes the pick after big guns according to me but google is best.

google will expand.. soon they will have there own shopping malls. supermarkets, cars... yep google will domenate

AOL is my ans.

Altavista is now yahoo SE

great details. google will always be number one for me.

I never thought that would be, what will going to happen to the search engines when they all buy out each other. Google is almost a monopoly of search engines. What if something happens and they find a huge flaw to the back bones of their systems...