Google-killers

May has been a pretty active month for online search. Two new “search engines” were released: one by an Internet powerhouse and the other by a mathematician. I use the term search engine loosely because according to them, they aren’t search engines at all.

Microsoft formally introduced “Bing” (www.bing.com) to the public on May 28th while Wolfram|Alpha (www.wolframalpha.com) was released on May 15th. While you may never use either of them they are important to know about because they are raising the stakes for “search engines”.

Bing – If you ask Microsoft, Bing is not a search engine, it is a “decision engine”. The theory behind Bing is that there is so much information on the Internet that it is no longer good enough to just receive a list of pages that are most relevant to your search. In order to facilitate the finding of information—specifically the right information for you—Microsoft has layered categories that will make it easy to find things that you are looking for. In the end, it allegedly allows you to find the information you are looking for faster.

The key question is whether this is a Google-killer or not. Probably not, but at least it does raise the bar as it relates to getting the specific information you're looking for in a more organized way.

Wolfram|Alpha – This search engine is so cool, it’s called a “computational knowledge engine.” Basically, it isn’t a search engine, because it doesn’t search web pages, but rather gives you answers to questions based on structured data. The thing is pretty smart—or at least the people who built it are—because it is based on mathematics. Here is the difference between how it searches and your traditional search: in a Google search for “Melville, NY” the results are a map of Melville (very good), a Wikipedia entry (good), then hotel guides, city data, etc, all on different websites. You do the same search on Wolfram|Alpha and you get city population, location, local time, current weather, and nearby largest cities, all on one page.

Clearly, Wolfram|Alpha isn’t gunning for Google. But if you need information that is based on some structured data in a quick and orderly fashion on just about anything, then Wolfram|Alpha is your engine. You will notice it isn’t perfect, but I think this is the beginning of a whole slew of engines that will use computation and some intelligence to deliver more accurate search results. Who knows, maybe Google would like to have something like Wolfram|Alpha in its arsenal.

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