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2008 predictions see Google in decline. I happen to agree with most of them. Google’s strategic errors entitle the users to seek alternatives to its products and services. While some of the applications provided by Google will still be extensively used, I see Google’s search engine in decline, basically because Google didn’t implement semantic type search fast enough to be able to compete with some of the new search engines that emerged in 2007.

1. Not particularly popular yet, hakia is nevertheless the only search engine that might put an end to Google’s supremacy. What hakia needs is better PR, an intensive approach of the social media environment and some products or apps that motivate the users to choose it over Google. I use hakia sporadically – its semantic search engine still needs fine-tuning, the results are not accurate enough, but let’s not forget that hakia is still in beta.

2. Quintura is the alternative visual search engine that is “not afraid of Google.” This is Quintura’s slogan and if you check it out you will easily understand why. Basically your search for a specific term will return a cluster of related tags in a tag cloud. Mousing over any of those tags will show even more related terms with links to sites that contain relevant information. I find Quintura particularly useful for research purposes. The engine bases its results on Yahoo! Search, which in all honesty are nearly as relevant as Google – so Google has yet another up and coming competitor in Quintura.

3. Clusty Search is a meta search engine that groups similar results into clusters after picking up the most relevant results from different search engines and directories. This solves the problem of long lists of results and as far as I tested Clusty – I couldn’t see results from Google. Ask and Gigablast are probably the most popular search engines used by Clusty Live.

4. I list Ms. Dewey from Live because she is funny, sexy and does have a lot of potential. This is a Live Search experiment, but I can already tell you that the search results are excellent. Ms. Dewey is a flash application, so you will probably not see her if your connection is too slow or if you don’t have Macromedia Flash installed on your PC.

5. Topix is a news search engine that is now popular enough to make me believe in its chances to take over Google News. The positive about Topix is that the users can not only search the news, but also edit and comment on stories. This adds another dimension to topical search and makes Topix a relative thorn in the side of Google.

6. Sphere is a blogs search engine that while not as popular as Technorati, it has a real chance of becoming the bloggers’ choice particularly due to its additional product Sphere It! The Sphere It! widget finds blog and media articles related to a certain blog post as a result of a semantic analysis of related blogs.

7. Omgili is quite interesting – although not really what I would call an alternative to Google. It searches mostly forums and user generated content. This cool engine has a chances to become popular in the social networking venue via this approach. Users utiliye Omgili to find customer reviews and opinions, discussions and debates.

8. A search engine I really like is exalead. This one is a good alternative to Google because its search features are somehow more flexible than Google’s. You have basic search, phonetic search, title search, boolean language search, search by date, search by prefix and much more. Learning the search rules is certainly not easy, but once you do, you’ll be surprised by their accuracy.

9. Now, if you want to have some fun, or at least a nice visual interface for your search results, try Kartoo. I am not really thrilled by it – I find it somehow confusing, but it does provide very good results and it could make a great search tool for kids.

10. Last but not least is Live Search. Remember that Microsoft is a company that constantly comes up with technological innovation. Google essentially copies or buys outright technology. You probably know that when a company becomes successful Google simply buys it instead of developing something better. A simple look at the list of Google acquisitions from the Wikipedia is enough to prove this point. This list shows that practically every “free” app offered by Google to its users was originally invented and developed by other companies.

The big fish will almost always swallow the little fish, and Google has bought dozens of successful companies or the patents for their inventions for the sole purpose of consolidating its empire to cover all possible online channels. So far Google has been successful. But you all know: “sic transit Gloria mundi” (”Thus passes the glory of the world”).