When tigers battle, mice get fat. That pseudo-Chinese proverb well describes one likely outcome of Microsoft's $44 billion bid for Yahoo, which would reduce the top three Web search providers to just two: Google and Micro-Hoo (or whatever the mashup of Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN Live search tool would be called).

Below, far below, these consolidating giants is a proliferation of search upstarts, some of them providing consumer-oriented Web searches and some providing highly specialized forms of enterprise search. The clash of the titans atop the search pyramid is opening up new opportunities for these smaller players while helping to enable a broad flourishing of innovation in information-access technology.

This wave of innovation was under way even before Microsoft's long-rumored attempt to mate with Yahoo to create a more formidable competitor to Google, which hosts more than half of all Web searches, became public. But the proposed Yahoo-MSN merger "absolutely" will create more opportunity for smaller, niche search providers, says IDC analyst Susan Feldman.

Take Silobreaker, which debuted its contextual search engine at last month's Demo conference. Silobreaker provides search results optimized for current events, with added-value elements including "context extraction" (how the person or topic fits in with other people, institutions, or categories), geographical mapping, trend tracking (graphing numbers of mentions in the world press), and relational mapping (tracing relations between entities or people). The engine draws content on global issues, science, technology, and business from about 10,000 news, blog, research, and multimedia sources.

Silobreaker is being introduced as a free Web tool, but CEO Kristofer Mansson sees opportunities for use by large companies and government agencies--including those in intelligence. Mats Bjore, the company's director of business development, comes out of the intelligence world: He helped set up intelligence efforts involving publicly available data for the Swedish Armed Forces.

Helping large enterprises break down the "silos" separating databases and other repositories is the specific province of startup Attivio. The company is headed by refugees from enterprise search provider Fast Search & Transfer, which was hoovered up by Microsoft at the end of last year for $1.2 billion. Attivio was formed to combine conventional Web search results that produce "unstructured data"--blogs, news articles, corporate Web sites, and so on--with "structured data" from enterprise database systems. Combining "the precision of SQL with the fuzziness of search," Attivio CEO Ali Riaz says, will be a huge market opportunity over the next several years.

	Context and connections are Silobreaker's strong suit

The heyday of Web-crawling, one-size-fits-all search engines may already be passing in favor of niche tools for specific industries. "There's so much broad focus on how to be a search behemoth," says Brad Bostic, co-founder and president of mobile search provider ChaCha, and that makes it difficult for those big companies "to be really great at all those niche areas."

One of those areas is rich-media search, which has attracted intense R&D from the likes of Google and Yahoo but also is attracting a raft of innovative startups. Also debuting at Demo was video search provider Eyealike, which provides content publishers with automated, frame-by-frame search for potential copyright violations in the expanding world of user-uploaded video on YouTube and elsewhere. "It's fast, relevant, scalable, and it's the most simple and accurate solution to solve the copyright wars," says president Greg Heuss.

Ending the search engine wars won't be simple or quick. But it's one war where the peasants are likely to thrive, not get pillaged. Innovative, highly targeted search providers sense their opportunity--and they're marketing powerful, personalized, and predictive technologies to take advantage of it.