Sites that didn't go popular like google

There were some search engines in the world wide web before google
launches some 10-12 years back. Google not only outdid all the
existing search engines from the search market but also become synonym
for search engine. The term googling was added to the Oxford dictionary
that means searching something on google.com

Given the success of google many companies tried to replicate the
success of google and though they were unable to replace google but
some site really were as good as google if not better. In this post
I'll share the ideas of some very good sites that didn't become
popular like google.

1) Grotal.com - Grotal comes at number one in the list. This local
search engine works on a very basic funda that it lists business that
don't have a website. This is a great thing in my opinion. But the
drawback is that sometimes phone number and address mentioned at
Grotal are incorrect or not working. An interesting thing to share
about Grotal is that it was launched by the name of Moogle with the
URL www.moogle.in but they got a notification from google and then
shift to the name of grotal. This site currently got a alexa rank of
7000 which means site is really getting some good amount of traffic.
However majority of the traffic is from Google this means that grotal
is totally dependent on Google and will die if sites disappears from
the google search results. Anyhow a nice concept and they have other
modules like education, tolet, PG and video etc. Let see how this site
will progress in a year or two.

2) Live: When Microsoft launched Live as a search engine replacing the
exisitng MSN, it was speculated that Live will give a tough
competition to Google and Yahoo. However Live didn't get as popular as
expected and soon Micrisoft launched bing which now partners with
Yahoo ad provides search results to Yahoo. Bing though is performing
better as comapred to live.

3) Guruji: When a groupd of IIT students launched this Indian search
engines, it created a buzz. Lots of marketing, viral news but guruji
never beacame the search engine that the founders might have expected
to.