Evan Britton, a Plymouth-Whitemarsh High School ('96) and UPitt graduate who made a pile of money brokering Web addresses, via his www.SiteLauncher.com, says he's getting traction with his new site, www.Sency.com, which sorts Twitter posts "to tell you what people are talking about in real time."

Citing data posted by Amazon.com's www.alexa.com, Britton says visits jumped from 10,000 last October to 150,000 in January. "I need 1 million hits a month to be scalable," attracting enough Web advertising to pay for expansion, he told me over burgers at Marathon Grill. "We'll be there this year if we just keep feeding the stove." He's working to move Sency onto smartphone apps.

Sency's in "a very tight race," says Charles S. Knight, who attended Radnor High School and UVa. before setting up  www.AltSearchEngines.com and, currently, www.TheNextWeb.com/search, which rates the many aspirants to post-Google dominance.

Knight counts Sency as one of at least 10 firms jockeying to dominate free real-time searches: "Topsy.com, OneRiot.com, Collecta.com, Wowd.com. . . . It's all about, who gets to the million [hits-a-month] mark soonest, who learns to monetize it first, and who gets bought by Google or Microsoft Bing first."

How valuable is this? "Tweeters are ordinary people. A lot of the time they're saying nonsense," Knight said. "If I want news, I get a feed from the New York Times." Still, Knight likes Sency's focus on smartphones, whose proprietary data applications threaten to fragment the free Web into what some users call a "Splinternet" (cf, Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research) of subnetworks you have to pay to use.

What does Knight admire? "Siri.com, which isn't just a 'search' engine, it's a 'do' engine. You tell it [via voice-recognition software] what you want it to search for - 'I need two reservations to the Knicks and a nice French restaurant and a cab home,' - and it already knows who you are, where you are, what you need. Soon, you won't have to search anymore."

He's also attracted to simplified search engines like Gabriel Weinberg's Valley Forge-based www.DuckDuckGo.com. "It's Google Light," says Weinberg. "They strip out all the garbage - video, ads. And it's intelligent. You search for 'wolf,' it'll ask, 'What wolf do you mean?' and list some choices."

Weinberg's a twentysomething graduate of MIT who sold his Web site, NamesDatabase, to Classmates Online Inc. in 2006, and retired here to invest in new companies and raise his child with his wife, a GlaxoSmithKline Plc statistician.

"Around M.I.T., we had a lot of people starting companies," he said. "We started this group, Hackathon." His Philly chapter "is growing slowly over time," with help from people at the LiquidHub consulting group, among others. They meet every month, sometimes in an office at Cira Centre, sometimes at the Bear Rock Cafe in King of Prussia. "There's random people making sites," he explained. "We try to put them together."