“This town ain’t big enough to hold the both of us!” A memorable movie quote uttered by Fred Graham in the 1945 film Bandits of the Badlands.  Within the search engine community, the only contender big enough to say this is Google. Google is the dominant force in Search Engine Marketing with over 65% of the market. Google has the algorithm, the rules, the glamour and the allure. Google PageRrank is the holy grail of SEO.  

Just recently, the two other main search engines, Yahoo! and Bing, have cemented their deal to merge.  The merger will allow the Microsoft Bing search technology to be used on Yahoo! sites. Testing has already begun on about 25% of their traffic.  Bing and Yahoo! are hoping this alliance will put a dent into Google’s market share.
 
Is there room for another player in this market? For the past two and a half years a new search engine, Blekko, has been in development.  Blekko’s spokesperson says they will be offering a new level of service that other search engines haven't allowed. While Google is very secretive over their algorithm, Blekko states that they are planning on giving users access to their algorithm and data which they'll use to determine relevancy and rankings.
 
Another differentiating feature of Blekko is their Slashtags.  Slashtags will filter results. Some examples of Slashtags are:  /news, /date, /blog.  Users can create and share Slashtags based on a group of URLs.
 
Blekko is still in testing and not available for use. Look for it to emerge around late summer 2010.