Category Archives: Web

Something unusual happened today.  Something that hasn’t happened since around the year 2000.

People have started talking about a new search engine. 

Granted, it isn’t with the same “HAVE YOU SEEN HOW GREAT THIS IS?” enthusiasm that started Google’s viral growth.  It’s more of a “I kind of like the front page images”, or “you know, the results aren’t too bad” groundswell.  Microsoft, compete.com and various other are claiming good growth, and the graph I like to show every so often (which includes cuil.com and wolframalpha.com) is a good look for them (As predicted, both of the others are now on a very large downturn)

Then, something even more interesting happened, for me: I chose to do a search on Bing.com instead of Google.  And I got better results.  Yes, better results.

Okay, they were only better for the first page, and “better” is a subjective measure here, but that’s how Google caught on – by getting the first 5 results better, with less spam and less irrelevance.  Sure, Bing is subject to less “gaming” than Google is, and that might just be the explanation.  But I get the feeling that something, just a little something interesting is happening here.  It’s no revolution yet (which is a significant shame), but there’s an outside chance it’s the beginnings of one.

Great photography on the home page combined with interesting facts is fun, sure.  And good search results are crucial, that’s a given.  But MS needs to up the ante, they’ve got an opportunity now where the incumbent is feeling a bit tired and staid despite their incredible efforts to innovate.  And Microsoft could just, at a long shot, grab some market share back.  Here’s some freebie tips, Microsoft:

1. Target the home page images so they’re relevant to me 
2. Get rid of the in-context popups next to search results
3. Break out of the Google-style search results listings – a link and two lines of text isn’t very innovative
4. Given that most people (79%) click on results 1-3, make these results richer, with more information
5. What’s with the white space (on the right as below)?

Finally, to follow up on my predictions for Wolframalpha and Cuil, as they are the only other substantial pretenders from the “new” school of search.  It is a shame that they didn’t make it, but it does underline the difficulty of the task:

WolframAlpha launched today (a launch that was so well PR’d it would be worth working out who their agency is, they know their stuff obviously).  So I’ll add some column inches to their growing coverage.

Firstly, I hope they don’t do a Cuil, for their sake.  Cuil’s growth graph (sic) is below:

Secondly, they’re obviously not a search engine in the traditional sense.  Putting them up against Google doesn’t actually mean much, as there is currently little comparision in what the two sites do.  Their example searches (Eb major scale, Doppler shift 300Hz, 40gal primer) demonstrate that their target market (or at least the market they are likely to attract) isn’t the same – it’s a much smaller subset of scientific, mathematical or academic audiences.   In addition, none (or few?) searches lead to any outside results.  Wolfram is clearly trying to present “knowledge”, so perhaps in their eyes that’s the whole point – they are not actually a Google competitor at all.

Thirdly, there is a “Google can do this too” risk.  Google does a great job of additional, simple, knowledge-based tasks.  It knows that if you search for “25 GBP in USD” or “twenty five pounds in dollars” you want the value of 25 British pounds in US Dollars.   Wolfram does the same, and if you wait a while, you get a historical graph and a table that for some reason shows you the UK pound against the Swiss France, Chinese Yuan and Norwegian Kroner (but nothing else).  Then at the bottom of the page you get the following message:

That’s not a very mass-market friendly message – which I think sort of summarizes the WolframAlpha issue.  It’s too rarified, and its neat tricks (some of which are, without a doubt, neat), are of appeal to a very small subsection of the market.   Are they just really some other tools (like a dictionary, financial information and science facts) with a new front end? Cuil’s selling point (indexing more than Google) wasn’t a benefit to the mass-market either – and their search results didn’t compete in terms of usefulness (or user-friendliness) with Google.

For most “normal” searches, WolframAlpha responds with “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input David Tort Droid / 7 Eleven mp3 album “.   Appart from the fact that most people won’t understand what “input” means in this context, this does mean most of the audience will switch off, and not come back.  It’ll be interesting to see if WA can (or will) change quickly enough to keep the PR momentum going – or if it will become a niche provider to mathematicians, chemists and those who want some neatly-formatted knowledge from various sources, brought together in one site.