The first PCs ever made had only few colors available, 16 if we remember it correctly, based on red, green and blue or RGB. Computer users needed more and today we take millions of colors on our screens for granted. Going back to 16 colors is not an option for us. Ten years ago (when color resolution was still an issue) the search engines weren't as powerful as the large search engine are today and there were fewer technical issues to solve, but Web users had a variety of search engines to search for Web information. The search engine landscape was, perhaps, more colorful than it is today.

The search engine industry as it is today has three major players. The Web user has many alternatives, but the three major players have done their marketing correctly since most Web users are using those three search engines. Are the most popular search engines the best search engines also? We have some doubts about that. We don’t know enough about the way they calculate search results. We don’t know if the search results are the best for the Web user or the best suitable ones. We don’t know the criterion for Web sites to be an option in search results. We don’t know the size of the search indexes. We don’t know if Web sites have equal opportunities of being found. We could go on for a long time with “we don’t know”.

Indexing the entire Web is such an enormous task that it can only be done with computer power and knowledge beyond the scope of any new start-up or a two-student company. People want to search where they believe most of the Web information is available for searching and how good the search results are or how they are presented and calculated may not be an issue. The Web user’s feeling that he is searching at the right place is likely the reason why he uses the major search engines rather than alternative search engines that might give him much better results.

Web search today is in red, green and blue and it is up to us, the Web users, to make sure Web search will in the future be available to us in millions of colors reflecting all the creation, design, innovation and creative writing taking place over the Web. Try a different search engine today; it might surprise you and it could add a new color to your search experience; a color that you may have never seen before.