Ever since Google descended on
the online search scene in 1998,
it has remained unconquered. Such has been the domination of
Google over the web search that even the mighty Microsoft has felt helpless in
offering its nemesis any kind of challenge. In the meanwhile, many search
engines have come and perished. The casualties include early movers like
Magellan, Infoseek and Snap, incidentally, all of which got closed in the same year,
2001. However, a few lucky ones who have survived—from lesser-known Lycos,
Excite, HotBot, and AskJeeves to biggies like Microsoft's MSN Search
and Internet pioneer Yahoo!—have either gone through costly revamps or
several reincarnations. Yet none has been able to pose any significant challenge to
the Mountain View, California-based search giant which derives its
name from the word, `Googol,' the mathematical term for 1 followed by 100 zeros.
In this backdrop, the unveiling of some new search engines comes as a
major surprise. Among the most talked of all the new kids on the block
is WolframAlpha (WA), a brain child of Dr. Stephen Wolfram, a Physics
prodigy who created the much popular Mathematica software. Dr.
Wolfram's new creation which calls itself a computational knowledge engine thus
claims to be a breed apart. The SE answers a range of queries, from complex
engineering problems to generating stock price charts, all with ease.
This is
unlike conventional search engines such as Google that only generate links
to other websites rather than throwing answers on their own.
"WolframAlpha is like plugging into a vast
electronic brain. It provides extremely impressive and thorough answers to a wide range
of questions asked in many different ways, and it computes answers,
it doesn't merely look them up in a big database," said Nova Spivak, Founder
of Twine.com. Besides WA, another notable debutant is Bing (meaning
`sound of found') from Microsoft; although some call it a reincarnation of
LIVE Search. The Redmond giant which for long was looking to develop a
new search engine that could beat Google got a boost after it acquired Powerset,
a natural language search startup, in July last year. Projected as a
`decision engine', Bing offers features like `Best Match', which identifies the best
answer, and `Instant Answers', which provides information in the body of
the search results page. "Unlike Google, which generally returns links to
mere websites, Bing crawls listings at review services like Yelp.com and
CitySearch. It then summarizes the results and displays a scorecard for each, rating
things like service, drinks, food, wait time, lunch offerings, and so on, all laid out
in a neat comparative table," observes Ryan Singel in his post on
Wired.com. "Unfortunately, the interface is
confusing and you could easily miss this feature if you didn't know to look for it,"
he adds. "We are introducing a new level of organization to search results, and
our differentiator will be the best results for query," Satya Nadella, Senior
VP (R&D, online services division), Microsoft, said in an interview. |
