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New Search Engines
Posted by Kupr in Online Tools, media, ppc, seo
Reading through some of the press at the moment, it seems like there is a quiet a bit of action around search engines at the moment. Microsoft are announcing they will be launching their new search engine (or Decision Engine, as they seem to be calling it!) ‘Bing‘ backed by a reported $100m. Then there is a new computational search engine Wolfram|Alpa, and something also a little different, and still in Beta, is Collecta, which brings back results from the likes of twitter, wordpress, and flickr.
I have yet to see anything of Bing, but it is clear Microsoft are still, ‘going for’ Google. The merger with Yahoo! seems to be all but finished, leaving Microsoft having to re-engineer their own search engine, rather than acquire the better perceived Yahoo! search. However, will Microsoft ever be able to take market share from Google. Google have only ever run some very small advertising campaigns, mainly targeted at small business, they have never gone mass broadcast. So does it seem likely Microsoft can ‘advertise’ their way in? Google have a search product that ‘just works’, it’s simple, quick, relevant and easy to use. Microsoft will have to add some good functionality to prise users away from Google, and take market share. The use of page tabs on the left side of the results could be a nice way to group results into useful categories that helps the user find the most relevant result to them. I guess we’ll have to watch and see.
On the note of doing something different, we have Wolfram|Alpa. The difference here, is that this is a computational search engine.
So, if we run a query for ‘Birmingham’, we get a lot if information back, about population, local time, temperature etc. (Click the link to see the results results for birmingham) The same query on a traditional search engine, would bring back a list of hotels, football clubs, wikipedia etc. So it’s fair to say Wolfram|Alpha is inherently different, and I would be surprised if it becomes anywhere near mainstream, despite being useful.
And then we have Collecta. Here they are also trying to do something different, and their model seems to be based on the band wagon of social media. Entering a search term, will give you a list of twitter posts, blog articles, and photos on flickr. I guess this could be interesting to see what people are talking about on a certain subject, in a near real time environment. Certainly in the wake of a major event or disaster, you would have a better grasp of the issue through these channels rather than waiting for the relatively slower news agencies to catch up. It will be interesting to see how this develops.
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