Shivaun - 2:00 pm on Aug 21, 2006 (gmt 0)

Unfortunately, I believe that even if your alogrithm is better than Google's, new entrants are now locked out of the search market.

This is because many webmasters will quickly add a new unrecognised crawler that starts to crawl their site to the "go away" list in their robots.txt file. And if you ignore the robots.txt, then they will block your ip address/es.

Therefore, although this makes me very sad, I believe that the only potential candidates for impacting Google's current near-monopoly of search must come from the pool of current search players.