Ask anyone which search engine they use to find information on the Internet and they will almost certainly reply: "Google." Market research tell us that people actually use four main search engines for 99.99% of their searches: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com (in that order). What could be holding out the .01% of the market?
What’s interesting is that there are actually hundreds of thousands of search engines holding on to the last 100th of a percent of the market. They have stayed alive because they are the innovators. Let’s take a look.
Innovative Search Homepage
The first thing that almost everyone sees when they go to search the Internet - the ubiquitous Google homepage. That famously sparse, clean sheet of paper with the colorful Google logo is the most popular Web page in the entire World Wide Web. For millions and millions of Internet users, that Spartan white page IS the Internet.
Staring at an almost blank sheet of paper has become, well, boring. There’s room for innovation. Take Ms. Dewey, an experimental campaign from MS and the guys at McCann-Erickson, for example. While some may object to her sultry demeanor, it's pretty hard to deny that interfacing with her is far more visually appealing than with an inert white screen.
Artificial Intelligence on Your Cell Phone
A second arena is sometimes referred to as Natural Language Processing (NLP), or Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is the desire we all have of wanting to ask a search engine questions in everyday sentences, and receive a human-like answer (remember "Good Morning, HAL"?). Many of us remember Ask Jeeves, the famous butler, which was an early attempt in this direction - that unfortunately failed.
Enter ChaCha. With ChaCha, pose any question that you wish via online or via text message on your mobile phone, and a ChaCha Guide appears in a Chat box and dialogues with you until you find what you are looking for. There's no time limit, and no fee though it’s still very beta.
Meta-Metasearch Engines
When you perform a search on Google, the results that you get are all from Google’s index and cash of the web. But metasearch engines allow you to search not only Google, but a variety of other search engines too - in one fell swoop. There are many search engines that can do this, Dogpile and Webcrawler, for instance, search all of the "big four" mentioned above (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask) simultaneously. You could also try Zuula or PlanetSearch - which plows through 16 search engines at a time for you. A very interesting site to watch is GoshMe. Instead of searching an incredible number of Web pages, like conventional search engines, GoshMe searches for search engines (or databases) that each tap into an incredible number of Web pages. As best we can tell, GoshMe is a meta-metasearch engine (still very Beta).
The Last Question
Issac Asimov, the preeminent science fiction writer of our time, once said that his favorite story, by far, was The Last Question. The question, for those who have not read it, is "Can Entropy Be Reversed?" That is, can the ultimate running down of all things, the burning out of all stars (or their collapse) be stopped - or is it hopelessly inevitable?
The question for this age is‚ "Can Google Be Defeated?" or is Google's mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" accomplished?
Perhaps the place to start is by reading (or re-reading) Asimov's "The Last Question." I won't give it away, but it does suggest an answer.
Of course the launch of these innovative search engine ventures doesn't always live up to the hype. Check out: HRmarketer's blog posting: "cuil's Opening Week"
1 comments:
Interesting topics could give you more visitors to your site. So Keep up the good work.
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