Wow! SEO interest already, I must have read my traffic numbers wrong

We don’t have a toolbar as such, but we do support plugins on Firefox and IE 7.

See:
http://www.ablegrape.com/en/help.html#faq9

As to your other points: yep, it’s a niche engine. It was originally intended for professional users, or at least, lets call them “passionate consumers” (i.e. wine geeks). To that end, it was designed to make things faster for repeated use, on the premise that a user who needs to find good wine information frequently doesn’t mind spending a few minutes learning something a little (hopefully not too) different if it will save them many hours in the long run. That’s the premise, anyway; only time will tell if it’s a good one.

Not sure about the fate of small search engines vs. Google and Yahoo! (big three? is there a third? I do know that for my needs neither of those search engines was remotely useful, and I’m a power searcher. But I’m not trying to conquer the world, just make something useful for a small set of people, and hopefully eke out paying the bills. It’s more of a self-funded labor of love than a VC-backed pie-in-the-sky sort of thing.

Cheers,
d