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Scott Jones is relying on a business-world version of the time-honored "ask your teenager" approach. His site ChaCha employs more than 31,000 workers, half of them college kids, to serve as guides for stumped online searchers. The guides chat online with users for three minutes on average, and then provide them with a list of results. They work part time from home and earn between $5 and $10 an hour.

The approach is expensive, but Jones hopes to bring in revenue by running video ads for users while they wait. Then there's the bigger prize. Data collected from ChaCha's conversations will serve as the backbone for an automated search engine that will one day compete directly with Google. At least one Web pioneer thinks Jones is on to something: Amazon's (NASDAQ:AMZN) Jeff Bezos is one of Jones's lead investors.

The people-not-machines approach also underlies Wikia, a company started by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Plans remain under wraps, but the gist is that users will edit automated search results for relevance. Like Wikipedia, Wikia will allow users to track changes and identify who is making them, undercutting efforts to manipulate search results. "Someone can do something bad," says Wikia CEO Gil Penchina, "but at least it will be transparent."

The Specializers

Try out: The likes of toptenwholesale.com, zillow.com, and kayak.com

Unlike Google, "vertical search" companies don't rely on fancy algorithms or indexing technology. Instead, they specialize in a topic or industry and use rudimentary search means, such as collecting links to relevant sites or charging companies a per-click fee for a listing.

A handful of consumer-oriented vertical search engines--Zillow.com in real estate and Kayak.com in travel--have already garnered significant attention and Web traffic. The category also contains many business-to-business sites. For example, TopTenWholesale.com helps distributors source industrial-sized merchandise. (One recent posting offered a case pack of 200 laser pointers.) "Vertical search engines know their industries in a way that Google or Yahoo never can," says founder Jason Prescott, who reports sales of $1.5 million last year. That may sound small, but the market will top $1 billion in ad spending by 2009, according to Outsell, a Burlingame, California, research firm.

The Comeback Kids

Try out: yahoo.com, ask.com, and live.com

In a bid to grab market share, Google's major rivals--Yahoo, Ask.com, and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) --have been on a rebranding binge. Microsoft and Ask.com have introduced spare homepages that resemble you-know-who's. (Ask also retired its Jeeves butler mascot.) Not to be outdone, Yahoo recently unveiled Panama, which is intended to bring its system for placing ads alongside search results into parity with Google's system. None of these changes is revolutionary, but they could make these also-rans more attractive to companies that advertise online if Google's keyword prices continue to rise.

The Adsense Assailants

Try out: contextweb.com and quigo.com

Most people associate Google with search, and yet 39 percent of its revenue (or $4.2 billion) comes from the AdSense network, a service that allows website owners to display Google ads in return for a share of revenue. Some of Google's new rivals are bypassing search and instead going after this business. The problem with AdSense, they say, is that Google refuses to reveal the actual revenue split to its partner sites. A firm called ContextWeb is now offering sites more control over how much they are paid. Another upstart, Quigo, is letting advertisers be more choosey about where their ads are displayed; Google has promised to follow suit.

Whether or not the challengers gain a foothold in the market, their efforts are good news for all companies that rely on search-engine optimization and online advertising to boost sales. By challenging Google, they help to ensure that it doesn't become complacent. "Everyone thinks Google is great, but we don't have any reference point for what search can be," says Riza Berkan, founder and CEO of Hakia. "Search is not yet a solved problem."

Staff writer Max Chafkin can be reached at mchafkin@inc.com.

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