Exploring the Alternatives

[SearchInROW]

I have just recently began looking at the search industry. From what I understand Google is considered by many as the best. But in the grander picture they only crawl less than 1% of the web and provide at most 50% relevance in their results. This shows that there is a lot of room for improvement (maybe $4B worth of work?).

I am searching for innovative search technologies beyond Google. Could anyone mention any startups or university research or places where I could find this?

Thanks,
Hans

[rambodog]

Kartoo was mentioned in this thread and I had never seen it before. I am a bit "concerned" after looking at it closer.

www.Kartoo.com appears to be providing paid ads (Overture) in the middle of the page stripping out the contextual ad information in the middle and showing the ad information on the left side when you "mouse over" that part of the display.

I have clients paying over $20 a click for some terms and they are possibly removing important information that "screens out" inappropriate clicks. I don't see anything on Kartoo about them displaying paid ads first. PPC can be a bit tricky it seems.

[kohsis]

The popular msp yurweb has changed to yurnet.com , just trying to up all strings regarding this one.