Wikipedia search, Cuil trailing Google by a long shot

Two new search engines that have garnered attention in the press as possible Google slayers continue to trail the world's most popular search engine by a long shot.

Wikia Search, a highly anticipated search engine from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales that debuted officially in January, held a 0.000079% share of the search market in the U.S. at the end of last week, according to Internet researcher Hitwise.

Cuil.com, which launched just a few weeks ago, has fared better with a 0.0070% share of the search market in the U.S. at the end of last week, but Hitwise attributes a portion of that share to the sharp rise in searches on the Web site that came from fanfare from its launch.

Cuil's search share is trending down now, according to Hitwise. Cuil hit the spotlight in news reports in part because some of its top people are former Google search engineers.

Google, by contrast, accounted for 70.77% of all online search engine queries in the U.S. for the four weeks ending July 26, according to Hitwise. The figure is Google's 10th consecutive record high in monthly search share, and up from the 64.35% share it took in July of last year.

Despite lagging in the distance, Wikia Search at least continues to move forward.

On Monday, Wikia Search released the latest update to its Grub tool, which crawls the Web indexing pages.

The company's search engine is based on the idea to get people involved to aid in its development by ranking Web sites and downloading Grub so the Web crawler can tap into unused bandwidth on their PCs.

Wikia Search also early this month launched an official version of the Wikia toolbar that can be downloaded and added on to the Firefox Web browser.

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