Search
engine options offer new ways to help you find what you need
by
Alan Zisman (c) 2009 First published in
Business
in Vancouver July 14-20, 2009 Issue #1029
High Tech Office column
A
decade ago, cyberspace was abuzz with startups trying to offer users
ways to search the rapidly growing web. With the rise of Google, all
this became irrelevant for most users. But apparently hope springs
eternal. Recently, we’ve seen several new twists on the Internet search
theme.
Searchme.com calls itself “the first multimedia search
engine.” Taking a visual cue from the cover-flow mode of Apple’s iTunes
media player, it presents search results as a scrollable set of images
of web pages. If you find it easy to scan a page full of Google “hits”
to find what you want, you’ll find it slow and awkward, but if you work
better with visuals than with text, it may be a better way to find what
you’re looking for. Worth checking out.
Wolfram|Alpha isn’t
challenging Google head-on. Built as an online front-end to Wolfram’s
Mathematica software, it calls itself a “computational knowledge
engine.” Type in a math calculation or formula and you’ll get the
answer. You can use natural language, such as “What is 15% of $1,000?”
More interesting is that it also uses stored databases that are
regularly updated.
Ask “What is the weather in Vancouver, B.C.,
today?”and Google gives a page listing various sites with weather
reports. Wolfram|Alpha instead gives the current temperature and more,
plus charts showing the temperature over the past 24 hours and
temperatures on this date for the past 30 years.
In other words,
rather than getting links to sites where you might find what you’re
looking for, Wolfram|Alpha gives you the answer. Very neat – at least
when it works. It’s limited by its stored databases, but also because
its understanding of users’ questions is very much a work in progress.
Too many phrases get a “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your
input” response. Still, it can provide a wide range of interesting
information. Try comparing two companies listed on the stock exchange,
for instance.
Microsoft has a long history of trying to achieve
online critical mass. In 1995, its then new Microsoft Network (MSN)
unsuccessfully targeted America Online. Services like Hotmail and MSN
Messenger achieved some popularity, but offered little to differentiate
them from the competition. More recently, the company has offered a
range of online Windows Live services aimed at home and small business
users.
The company has long offered online search services under
a variety of names, including MSN Search and Windows Live Search but
has perennially been in third place behind Google and Yahoo. The latest
version went live in June under the name Bing. Microsoft calls it a
“decision engine.” Like Wolfram|Alpha, it also promises instant
answers: sports scores, stock prices, flight information and direct
answers to some simple questions: “What is the capital of Alberta?”
works. “What is the shortest flight from Vancouver to Paris?” doesn’t.
Bing told me that “the shortest flight out of Vancouver, B.C., is 32
miles.” Like Google, typing the weather question in Bing gets a page of
links to weather sites, not the answer.
A sidebar offers helpful
related links. A search for “Vancouver traffic” shows, on the side,
related searches for local traffic cams, current traffic conditions and
more. Bing promises localized movie, restaurant, hotel and other
information. But somehow, these didn’t seem to work to my expectations.
Nice though: hover the mouse cursor by the right edge of a search
result to get text from the linked page. There are extra features for
major sites: FedEx tracking numbers, business customer service info,
for instance, and travel planning information courtesy of the
Microsoft-owned Farecast service. Video search results provide playable
thumbnails – very cool!
Shortly after its June 3 startup, Bing
passed Yahoo, gaining the No. 2 spot among search engines. With
worldwide share of 5.62%, it will have a long way to catch up to
Google’s 87.6% share, though.
Despite Google’s dominance, for
multimedia search, computational knowledge, or quicker decision-making,
one of these may help you find what you need to know more easily. •