Are the search engine wars over?

This column does not have a single author, but is submitted by a number of experts that contribute regularly to our news source.  Some are in Canada, some in the UK and one is in the far east

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Microsoft does not want to give an inch to Google in the Search Engine wars so they have launched a new product called BING.  You can use it by going to www.bing.com

So what's happening?  The wars started rather meekly.  OPEN Text had an early one.  Alta Vista was very, very good, but they did not dominate.  Yahoo has their own search engine bundled in with their online offering.

The winner and champion so far is of course Google

Microsoft has had a search engine for years on its MSN offering, but it has not gotten traction.  Will this be like the word processing and spread sheet wars, where Microsoft got a late start and then got better and better to become the industry standard?

The prognosticators pick Google to win, but Microsoft might come up with a breakthough.

The future of search engines is not limited by what we do with them today.  Everybody is trying to come up with the next generation where inference will lead to results quicker and more easily than we do now.  How  it will work is anyone's guess. 

Will it be a language based query that narrows searches? Will it be a some combination of tools arranged in such a way that it leads to quick and easy to understand results?

Will search engines be able to look inside an image to find out things that we are searching for imperfectly?   Here is an example of that, which would be useful.

Suppose you have a photo album that contains thousands of images.  (Many people do).  Could you present a single picture of a person and have the search engine find all possible pictures with that person in it?  Could you do the same for  music by humming a short piece of a tune and having the engine find all versions of that song on your machine or the web?

All the big guys are using our behavior to help others.

 What? 

When we search for things the big guys keep track of what we do with those first results.  They examine us and use our methods as statistics that are supposed to help others.  Suppose thousands of searches for an item statistically point out that they are not presenting the most probable result on the first page.  It would behoove them to monitor this and put the right thing on the top of the queue.

(next column)

27/09/2009 10:44 PM

It sounds easy, but it isn't.

Also, we could foresee group searches.  Suppose you are interested in an arcane subject that has an attraction for others, but not many.  Suppose you want to know everything about the World War II German 88 cannon that had so many uses.  If you could collaborate with others in searches, that would be good.  We don't mean working in an interest group, where we get to know the people.  We mean working together at the same time on searches for similar things.

How good can search engines get?  We think they can get very good indeed.  They can know you better.  That is, know your search habits.  We see some of this when we go back to www.amazon.com over and over again. They greet us and they know our buying history, so right away they offer us like books to ones we've done in the past.

So it would not be hard to imagine our German 88 researcher going into his search engine with a new search for something and be greeted with results about something he/she could not find in the past that the search engine had acquired or had been introduced to in the interim.

It would be like meeting an old friend and having them say:

"By the way, remember you asked about Phil?  Well, I've learned subsequently that..... "

Stay tuned and try www.bing.com