R/W mentions that California is home to quarter of top 100 alt search engines. What is amazing about this news is not that California is the center of web innovation, rather, it is striking that there are 100 alternative search engines (and them being mentioned).
Other search engines like Naver are gaining strength in the local and vertical search markets. What puzzles me is that there are so few news about Google's search engine innovation in comparison to the torrents of startup specialized search engine companies. If Google fails to keep up in areas of natural language searches and vertical search, then it will loose its technology leadership. Furthermore, this might pave the way for best of breed products to replace Google in different industries. Result: erosion of Google market share.
