Martin: This week we are looking at a couple of search engines that have recently had high profile launches. Are they any better than Google and if not, why bother with them?
I’ve been looking at Bing. Bing is Microsoft’s search engine and essentially just a re branding exercise on the old Live search. I won’t go into detailing all the new features that it uses to compete with Google, others have done that for me. I’ve found that in day to day use it is nearly as good as Google. Some of the results seem to be not quite as relevant as Google’s, but maybe it will just take a while for the page rank systems to sort themselves out. I am willing to offer them the benefit of the doubt on that one. As with the old Live search I think that their image search is much better than Google’s. It presents the results as pictures only, and gives me the other details when I hover the mouse over the picture in question. I much prefer that to Google image search’s system.
Overall I think that it is pretty much equal to Google, but the big problem is that it isn’t better than Google. My brain has developed a sub conscious reflex to Google things when I want to know about them. It takes a conscious effort to ‘Bing and Decide’ instead. So I can’t see myself jumping ship for a while yet. i hope plenty of people do jump though. Google has a very dominant position on the internet, they need strong competitors to keep them in check and push them to do better. I hope for one thing that they are looking at their image search results already.
So, Thomas, you’ve been looking at Wolfram Alpha. What the flip is that? Is it any good?
Thomas: It is good. It is very good indeed, but Google need not run scared.
Wikipedia call W|A an ‘answer engine‘ to differentiate it from the Googles of the world. Search engines like Google simply inhale the contents of the internet into a vast database, you type in a search query, and it spits out a list of pages that contain your particular phrase. W|A, on the other hand, will answer your question from it’s own database of facts. It doesn’t know as much as Google, but what it does know is more accurate. And that’s not all, the true geek credentials of its author are revealed when you explore the results page. Not only will it give you the answer you your original question, but it gives you every bit of data it knows or can calculate from the answer. Try asking ‘when was Neil Armstrong born?‘, not only do you get the date of birth, but also the time difference to today, the time of the sunset and sunrise and the phase of the moon! The only problems I’ve experienced are with its input mechanism and the limits of its knowledge. W|A takes natural language input and tries to make sense of it. I’ve often had problems tryingt he phrase a question that it can understand, and I also get frequent ‘Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input’. Sometimes the database of knowledge seems just a bit to US centric, I’ve had it struggle with some British place names.
W|A has certainly seen some use from me, I can while away hours asking it inane questions. Today I calculated my 10,000 day birthday and added it to my diary. I’ll be sure to send you all an invite to the party! It is in no way going to replace Google day to day for me though, and even if it does threaten the empire, Google is putting the finished touches to Squared…
Martin: Its good to see more useful tools for learning on the internet. As I said earlier Google needs competition to keep them focused. As the Internet has become many peoples goto reference material we need to make sure that the information is as relevant or useful as possible and that no single person or company has too much control of what we look at.
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