Business 2.0’s Erick Shoenfeld reports on a movement today to see if you can get by without the five major search engines, consisting of Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, (including MSN and Live Search), Ask and AOL. Search Engine Land reports there is also a parallel initiative to see if marketers can spend a day avoiding ad placements on these major engines.

On the former front, I’m most of the way through the day and it’s proved to be a difficult task, as expected. On the bright side, I’ve gotten to play with a variety of smaller (some vertically oriented) search engines. I’ve also found some neat meta-search engines and personalized home pages such as the sleek and feature-rich Schmedley (although this is cheating because meta search taps into all the major search engines for combined results).

Tomorrow I’ll do a local version of the experiment. I would recommend trying it someday (and share with us what you learned and what you found out there). To start out, Shoenfeld’s post has some good recommendations of sites you can use to wean yourself off Google for a day.

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