The Balkanization of Search?

While bloggers are known to nerd out at the idea that we’ll wake up tomorrow to see Twitter or Facebook (or Bing!) have taken Google’s throne, the near future likely looks more like this:

Cool Search Engines That Are Not Google

Instead of a Cold War between Google and the social media giants, doesn’t it seem more feasible that people will rely less on one engine for everything? Collecta is a better real-time search engine than Twitter (and, therefore, MUCH better than Google), but is it better than Almost.at?

Clearly, one search engine cannot meet every need. And, with the explosion of mobile apps, average users are more comfortable than ever with the idea of using different software tools for different tasks.

To use a particular example, I spent a couple hours last weekend comparing football ticket prices at several different broker sites. With FanSnap, I could’ve spent a couple minutes. Sure, Google could come up with something similar, but do we really need them to?