"Google likes to brag that they've never had a marketing campaign"

- Greg Notess ("Search Engine Expert") in EContent July 2002 issue,
   in an article titled "What makes Google Run?"
   http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/ArticleReader.aspx?CategoryID=18&ArticleID=936

Ooh ooh! Can someone collect the various companies that have claimed to be a "Google Killer" through the years?

A quick web & news search shows Google killers of the past:

- Wisenut
- Microsoft's search efforts
- Click Fraud
- Europe's Quaero
- Powerset "natural language" search engine
- Freebase
- Yahoo's search engine
- Eval (revenue-sharing search engine)
- ChaCha
- "Wikipedia itself"
- Wikiasari
- Natural Language search companies
- Vertical search
- Baidu
- Megaglobe (with click-fraud protection)
- Teoma
- Amazon A9

Of all those, I think Baidu and Yahoo have or had potential, though Baidu not anymore. (IMO Microsoft has potential only in terms of undermining Google, but not if you just look at the web platform.) Google might be the biggest potential Google killer, as Tony Ruscoe once said...

(Related search: to "out-Google Google")

“If we wanted to sell ad banners, we could call DoubleClick and be profitable today ... But we can be more successful in the long run if we grow our user base. ...”

Instead they did advertising their own way and bought DoubleClick. Reminds me of the entrepreneur Howard Hughes.