The Search Engine War Continues

Internet search is a multimillion dollar business. Google has been the search king for almost a decade, yet, that hasn’t deterred anyone from trying to compete in the market. The problem is that there has been a lot of promise with little delivery. A flux of new search technologies were announced last week, including new offerings from Microsoft, Google, and some new contenders.

It started with Wolfram Alpha which is not so much a search engine, as it is a data calculator. Someone uses a search engine, the site usually searches for words within a web page. Wolfram Alpha makes decisions based on your search query which allows you to compare data such as two stocks prices, the popularity of a name, research on this day in history. As the creator says, “its not a search engine its an answer engine.” Its an electronic brain that takes your search concept and displays it an informative and clean page. If anyone out there is fearing the singularity from Terminator, I’d say Wolfram Alpha is certainly a step in that direction.

Microsoft’s Bing.com, a search engine that organizes results into categorizes and gives more contextual search options. The video on their site shows how Bing will allow you to search restaurants, flights, coupons, and more, done on a global scale or only showing results in your city. The site will be replacing Microsoft’s Live.com search (who uses that?) upon release. read more

Ashton & Oprah Team Up to Kill Twitter

As if you didn’t have reason enough to hate him, Ashton Kutcher has ruined everyone’s favorite micro-blog site, Twitter. In an effort to make a charitable donation seem more exciting and to generate some self-publicity, actor Ashton Kutcher waged a bet against cable news channel CNN. The first to have 1 million followers by the end of the competition would win. Kutcher agreed to donate funds for 10,000 mosquito nets to charity for World Malaria Day if he won, and 1,000 if he lost.

In true Hollywood douche fashion, Kutcher tried to spin the competition after he had won it. He claimed the victory to be a sign of individual/web user empowerment over corporations. As Ad Age so eloquently points out, Kutcher doesn’t address the fact that CNN aired his web clips as part of their broadcast or that his entire career was created and fostered by the big media conglomerates he claims to have overcome. It’s easy to bite the hand that feeds when someone is already full. read more