Nusearch (www.nusearch.com), based in Bristol, claims to be the UK's first serious global search player. They have a distributed network of computers powering high capacity spidering. They produce quality, spam-free results (a big improvement on the previous version, it has to be said). They also have user oriented features that are pretty unique in the search space: instant preview, instant bookmarking (no registration required) and search within domains all with a slick, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) driven user interface.

What seems to make Nusearch stand apart, is their approach to advertising. Nusearch's Chief Software Architect, Giles Chanot, explains: “Google's whole search system relies on having the entire searchable web held in memory. Memory costs $100/GB and there's about 750,000GB of textual content on the web, conservatively – you do the maths. Our software is a thousand times more resource efficient. We pass on that saving to our advertisers.”

clickthrus at Nusearch have a flat rate cost of 10 cents. Further, with the Active Search programme – anyone with a website or blog can put a search box on their home page and random web visitors get converted - for free - into targeted users. This is a new proposition and might lead to the democratization of keyword advertising.
The company plans to open up its search results to any developer who wants to integrate it into their own website, with no cost.