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We train ourselves in hundreds of little routines to get through our days as expediently as our chosen levels of curiosity and efficiency demand.

Our habituation is especially true in the Internet world. Most of us have schooled ourselves on the use of at least one search engine - from Google to Yahoo to variants such as MSN and Dogpile - to find the information we are seeking from the ever-expanding Web universe.

Many of us have our preferred Internet search engine programmed as the first page that comes up when we open our browsers, or, more likely now, have the search engine choice installed on our browser tool bars.

If our cell phones are our new wristwatches, our search engines are our new phone books. So much so that "to Google" has become the generic verb for searching the Internet, in the same manner as "to Xerox" once meant copying in an earlier information era.

I suggest you add a hometown alternative to your search routine. Most New Mexicans do not know that Albuquerque is home to one of the world's top search engines, Gigablast.com, and its eponymous "Gigabot."

Gigablast bucks several technology and economic development trends important to New Mexicans.

By company and industry estimation, Gigablast is arguably in the top five search engines if measured by hundreds of billions of pages indexed. Gigablast engines provide search services for corporate and governmental Web sites, among other services.

The score sheet on search engines illustrates the "long tail" phenomenon, so to speak, where the biggie-sized search engines like Google and Yahoo are off the usage charts comparatively to all other search methods.

Conventional wisdom suggests that sitting in the shadows of the Googleplex is not an enviable place to be, at least in the name recognition sense. Still, Gigablast toes into the fray with uncommon spunk and fervor, delivering equitably powerful search results to you as the best-of-the-best provide.

Matt Wells, founder of Gigablast, is one of the region's best examples of a young tech entrepreneur. He is also one of our earliest Internet visionaries to commercially capitalize on the Internet in a globally recognizable way. When you meet him, he conjures up an earnest Steve Jobs-type demeanor.

Wells came upon his passion for Internet search algorithms while he was earning a bachelor's degree in computer science and a master's in mathematics at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro.

Wells sensed the emerging power of the Internet and moved to Sunnyvale, Calif., in 1997 soon after graduating from New Mexico Tech to work for one of the first major search engines, Infoseek.

This part of Wells' story unfortunately tracks with one of New Mexico's greatest economic development challenges. The region often exports our people, ideas and companies to other more entrepreneurially dynamic "techonomic" regions, such as Silicon Valley where every Starbucks is a business incubator.

New Mexico maintains one of the higher college graduate outward migration ratios of any state. Look into the individual stories, as I have, and many of these emigrants start businesses in their new hometowns.

One legendary example of this shift is Carl Berg, a University of New Mexico graduate from Tucumcari. Berg left New Mexico to become one of the world's leading tech industry real estate tycoons, noted in 2005 as the 548th out of 691 billionaires in the world tracked by Forbes.

Berg made his fortune as one of the early industrial park developers and grubstakers for Silicon Valley tech businesses.

Often, these people go silently, off the radar screens of our economic development planners and policies. Yet, the brain drain comes at a very high cost to our collective economic future.

Fortunately, Wells countered this trend in 2000, choosing to move back to New Mexico to write the code for the Gigabot and launch Gigablast.

Using and talking up Gigablast is a vote for the home team. Now, if we can clone and keep our other Wells and Bergs . . .