search me

So..... Google own the world of search now, but for how long? Will it be the M$ behemoth to topple the Google behemoth?

So Microsoft have launched BING which is in Beta at the moment and the word on the street is that it is pretty good. But is it going to be good enough to make any kind of dent in Google's share? Wired don't really think so... Steve Wozniak from Apple thinks it has potential.

I also just read that Bing in Chinese can mean biscuit, illness or ice... could be worse i suppose... Remember Mitsubishi's faux pas with the Pajero and it's rather unsavoury translation into spanish... eeek.

From the video, you can see they are trying to get away from the nebulous nature of search and are shifting the reference to a much more tangible outcome... a decision engine... clearly going for the jugular... and why not?






Also have to mention WolframAlpha which I would describe best as a living and breathing encyclopedia type search engine that serves the genuinely curious, brilliantly. it isn't about challenging what Google does as such, this is about being an information source for the information hungry.

WolframAlpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

...I can see how this has the potential to be a brilliant academic knowledge bank to beat all knowledge banks. Test it out on a question you have had bumping around that needs some good stats and facts... see this big daddy in action.