Almost 50 UK search engines disappear in 3 years

I keep a page on my site: Country and Regional search engines: United Kingdom which lists UK based search engines. I went through it recently to check to see if the links were still accurate, and pointing towards the search engines that were originally at that domain. Of 164 sites almost 50 search engines had ceased to exist. (The exact number was 46 - 28% of the total.) In many cases the URL no longer worked, in a small number of others the domain had been taken over and was essentially parked, and in an even smaller number the domain was being used for entirely different enterprises.

This isn't really that much of a surprise, given that the big four control well in excess of 90% of the market.  The search engines that seem to have survived, or perhaps even prospered are the UK variants of some of the major engines, or which have a specific unique selling point, covering specific parts of the country, or dealing with niche vertical markets.  Nonetheless, it still doesn't make comforting reading for an enterprises that are considering starting their own UK engines.

The collection of links, both live and dead can be seen on my site on the United Kingdom search engine web page.