There's more to search than Google

So, is there life beyond Google? It's tempting to think the market's sewn up, but there's actually a diverse ecosystem out there, full of niches Google hasn't reached.

E-tail is now worth £11bn in the UK, and most purchases start with a search. But search engines themselves are more important in the research phase; before making a purchase, many people turn to price-comparison sites. Pricerunner, Shopping.com and Kelkoo all provide one-stop access to hundreds of retailers, allowing consumers to compare features and prices at a glance.

While this has made a huge impact on white and brown goods, it's gained little traction in clothing, where much of the recent growth in e-tail has been focused. Like.com could change this, by allowing users to search for similar items to the ones they see. Search for 'shirt' in men's apparel, and a range of garments are presented. Click 'likeness search' next to the light blue short-sleeved shirt, and about 300 similar ones are displayed from dozens of manufacturers.

Search is further subdivided vertically, with uSwitch and Confused.com fighting for the market in financial services and utilities, and Moneysupermarket adding travel to these. This area has generated a flurry of M&A activity recently, with Scripps buying uSwitch last year for £210m, Admiral considering the flotation of Confused, and an expected £800m-plus IPO from Moneysupermarket this month. These businesses have created a new inter-mediary in the value chain, and price-earnings ratios of 40:1 show why the City has great expectations.

But search isn't all about buying. As the internet shifts from an information to an entertainment medium, online video is booming. While much of the talk around this area has centred on sites such as YouTube and Heavy.com, the fight is potentially much more lucrative.

The most talked-about name here is Blinkx.com, whose recent IPO on AIM values it at £120m. Blinkx claims to index video in a different way from other search engines, and to have a broader range of content than either Yahoo! or Google. But it is playing in possibly the most competitive development area online, up against dozens of start-ups such as Clipblast and Everyzing, as well as the big guns, AOL's Truveo and Google Video.

Although volumes are small now, video search holds the navigation key to future TV consumption. So these guys are well-resourced, and not keen to allow anyone else to eat their lunch.

The web is a medium where consumption is based on interest, and particular fields can attach very specific meanings to given words. In these cases, a gen-eral search can be a wild goose chase. Engineering, science, motoring and business have all spawned search engines dedicated to their topics, but perhaps the biggest area is medical search.

Described as 'the world's second opinion', medical search engines such as Medic8.com and omnimedicalsearch.com provide access to information on virtually any condition - not just for consumers, but for doctors too.

These sites have created useful services that are clearly differentiated. They're adding real worth to the search economy, and proving that the quality of search listings isn't measured by their length. But while they're making money and creating real businesses, they're not worrying Google. For most people, search starts and ends there, and that's the way it'll stay, at least while the most common search term on Yahoo! is 'Google'.