More re personalisation
It's in the algorithms - A glimpse into the future of mapping the Web
: "new technique for speeding up the computation of PageRank™ by 30 percent, and he proposed several algorithms for personalizing the ranking function to produce more relevant results for each individual searcher (see " )

potential competitors include WebFountain, Nutch and Netnose.

Developed by IBM, WebFountain (www.almaden.ibm.com/WebFountain) wants to challenge Google in the corporate market. WebFountain will collect, store and analyze vast amounts of information from unstructured and semi-structured sources including Web sites, news feeds, Weblogs, bulletin boards, enterprise data, legacy data, licensed content, newspapers, magazines and chat room text. The project's claim is that it can read and understand text, and use natural language processing, statistics, probabilities, machine learning, pattern recognition and artificial intelligence to keep organizations informed of emerging trends, competitive activities and "buzz".

Nutch (nutch.org) is an open source search engine that, unlike commercial search engines, will lift the veil on its ranking algorithms and demonstrate to users that there is no bias in its Web crawling and search returns. High scoring ranks will not be bought, sold or otherwise fudged.

Netnose (www.netnose.com) is the first search engine to claim to be "powered by people"; meaning search accuracy will be controlled by the voting public rather than a computer algorithm. Users will cast votes to determine what words should find what Web sites and as more people use the engine to match Web sites to search terms, the developers claim searching will get more and more accurate.