The Pirate Bay is a Swedish website that indexes and tracks BitTorrent (.torrent) files. It bills itself as “the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker” and is ranked as the 109th most popular website by Alexa Internet. The website is primarily funded with advertisements shown next to torrent listings. Initially established in November 2003 by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån (The Piracy Bureau), it has been operating as a separate organization since October 2004. The website is currently run by Gottfrid Svartholm (anakata), Fredrik Neij (TiAMO) and Peter Sunde (brokep).

Viewzi is a search engine company based in Dallas, Texas that is developing a highly visual experience that tailors the way users look at information based on what they are looking for. The search engine lightens the data overload by filtering and grouping results into several distinct interfaces. Users get over 16 “views” for their search including MP3 view (with a list of streaming audio you can play), album view (cover art and related musicians), plus specialized lenses for images, news, and more.

Powerset is working on building a search engine that can find targeted answers to user questions (as opposed to keyword based search). For example, when confronted with a question of the form ‘which U.S. state has the highest income tax?’, conventional search engines ignore the question and instead do a search on the keywords ‘state, income and tax’. Powerset’s product, on the other hand, attempts to use natural language processing to understand the nature of the question and then to search and return a subset of the web that …

Exalead is a French search engine involved in the Quaero project.
Exalead provides thumbnail previews of the target pages along with the results, and allows advanced refining on the results page (language, geographic location, file type, categories) but also further data refinement, such as rich content (audio, video, RSS) and related terms, allowing users to browse the web by serendipity.