• Fast Company, Wednesday, June 17, 2009 11:31 AM

Fast Company's Chris Dannen draws the correlation between America's oil addiction and the one to Google. It hit him, he says, when he heard Al Gore refer to America as an "oil junkie." He's joking, of course. Or is he? "Surely as we use our cars to get around, we use Google to launch our Web queries," he says.

And the cure to both of these addictions is the same: better, more efficient alternatives. "No matter what specific search task most of us undertake online, we always stupidly head to Google, our all-purpose search sedan," he points out, torturing the car metaphor further. But then Dannen starts to delve into our various search alternatives and his argument coalesces into a satisfying sludge. He doesn't start or stop at Bing and WolframAlpha, oh no. Dannen gets down into the pistons of search engines citing ChaCha for mobile search, NewsSift from the Financial Times for business queries, DuckDuckGo for being simple and clean, but then he pauses over what could be the next touted 'Google killer": the "discovery engine" Worio.

Worio works better than Google as an all around search engine, Dannen argues, because it returns results when you didn't know exactly what you were looking for. The journey is as important as the destination, if you will. If Dannen is to be believed, the age of compartmentalized search is upon us.

Read the whole story at Fast Company »