I don’t know if this’ll be useful to anyone or not, but over the past several months I’ve compiled a list of the physical locations of some search (using the term loosely) companies. Why? Because deep in my soul there still lives a librarian and ontologist. I’ve limited it to companies that have English products.

It’s certainly not exhaustive, so if you know more, send them my way.

United States

Silicon Valley/Peninsula/South Bay
A9 – Palo Alto
Become – Mountain View
Collarity – Palo Alto
Google – HQ in Mountain View
Kosmix – Mountrain View
Krugle – Menlo Park
Oodle – San Mateo
Riya – San Mateo
Spock
Surfwax – Menlo Park
Yahoo – HQ in Sunnyvale
Zvents – San Mateo

San Francisco
Groxis
LookSmart
Powerset
Rojo
Technorati
Trulia

East Bay
Ask – HQ in Emeryville
Seeqpod – Emeryville

Washington State
Findory – Seattle, WA
Infospace – HQ in Bellevue
MSN – HQ in Redmond
Zillow – Seattle

Elsewhere in the US
Answers.com – New York, NY and Jersulem, Israel
AOL – Dulles, VA
BusyTonight – NYC
Gigablast – Albuqurque, NM
Icerocket – Dallas, TX
Indeed – Stamford, CT and Austin, TX
Lycos (Hotbot) – Waltham, MA
MetaGlossary – Aventura, FL
Relona – Nashua, NH
Searchles – Washington D.C.
Snap – Pasadena, CA
Vivisimo (Clusty) – Pittsburgh, PA

Outside the US

Exalead – France
Kartoo – France
Lexxe – Australia

Not sure where these are located

Accoona
Eurekester -SF, New Zealand?
Dogpile
Keotag
Ixquick
Metacrawler
Metafind
Rawsugar
Rollyo
Webcrawler
Wink

I haven’t been able to dig into these, but here are some new search tools to check out:

Ask Jeeves – videos of how to use Ask: http://searchtools.ask.com/. Watch a smart woman in glasses show a guy how to search for Australia on Ask.

Collarity – query suggest and a slider to let you have results personalized to you or your community. Sounds intriguing, I need to look closer at this.

Like Visual Search – apparently Riya discovered it was too difficult to build facial-recognition software so they switched to product recognition. Search for clothing items to find similar items for sale.

Spock – people search engine (not live yet).

“In 2005, 47 search startups — a record for one year — received more than $260 million in venture funding, according to Dow Jones Venture Wire. The total sum of that backing was the high-water mark since 2000, when nearly $280 million was invested into 18 search startups.”

From: The search engine that would outdo Google
Commentary: Powerset shows off its freedom from the ills of ‘keywordese’

47, but I wonder about what classifies as a search start-up. How loose is the definition of “search”?

A couple of new engines (actually they’re pulling results from GYMA) have come out that show trust scores for search results.

Compete – uses three visual icons next to the results:

Trust – a check mark means the site is trusted. An exclamation mark means to be cautious.
Traffic – shows traffic rankings, but only for popular sites.
Deals – shows if the site has some kind of shopping deal available.

Scandoo – focusses specifically on security risks. They also offer topic categorization info. Look out for the little spider, that means “use caution.”

This is a pretty useful idea, though I wonder how most users would respond to it. Will they never click on a site if it is tagged as suspect? And if so, is that the correct way to handle security issues? Might it be better to continue with the current method of integrating trust issues into search results and demoting risky sites?

The other thing that’s tricky about something like this is the added visual cluttering of the UI. If you’re going to add something to the results, it better be very useful. For instance, I don’t think knowing about deals is useful. I also don’t think traffic rank is useful on a regular SERP. And do safe sites need a safe icon? How about just pointing out the very risky sites? And maybe instead of putting an icon, how about circling it and writing “danger”? Don’t make users read the legend to understand what the icons mean.

But it’s good to see companies tackling this issue. I hope both companies are successful in their efforts.