ffutures | Alternatives to Google, Wiki, etc.

I've been thinking about the differences between parallel worlds, and one of the things that occurred to me was that if the split is far enough back there would be different online resources - different search engines with different strengths and weaknesses, and so forth. The ones that I think I might want to use in fanfic are a different search engine - there are still several around, so it isn't hard to come up with another - and a different online encyclopaedia. I don't need to describe it in any detail, but I'd like to give a different name and if possible mention different strengths and weaknesses to Wikipedia.

Were there any serious rivals to Wikipedia that worked noticeably differently? I don't think I want to go with proprietary encyclopaedias such as Encarta, I'm looking more for something that gets input from multiple sources but works differently. Any suggestions?