Search News: This Season’s Crop of Search Engine Wanna-be’s
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Written By Noah Mallin | March 18, 2009 | Share This
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Tilting at windmills never seems to go out of style, nor does wanting to see a success story get taken down a few pegs (if not ruined altogether.) For those of us in the search marketing world these two maxims combine in the endless stream of “Google killer” articles and analyses that seek to find the holy grail of both media and tech geeks: The Next Big Thing.
Social media has received its go-round, though we showed in our last two posts how Reprise Media’s Managing Partner Peter Hershberg pretty much destroys that argument in the near-term. Search and social media simply aren’t mutually exclusive and social media doesn’t yet have the right kind of monetization on enough sites to attract serious marketing spend directly to the site operators.
Now we are returning to a similar mania as last summer, with several different search platforms once again drawing attention – most recently Kosmix, which smartly asks not to be compared to Google (don’t mention the elephant in the room!) and the snazzily named Wolfram Alpha which sounds like a cologne for the take-charge hirsute.
Unlike Wolfsbane Arfarf, Kosmix is available right now for a spin, and it’s worth taking it for a test search.
In some ways Kosmix is one of the most impressive search upstarts yet. Its homepage opts for more information rather than trying to be Cuil by aping the starkness of Google. Results are organized not by relevance per se, but in a way that makes the most of universal search with tabs for Reference results, Conversations, News and Blogs that are bold and clearly marked. They are organized with samplings from across the spectrum and even if some of the results it brings to the fore can be off base, they typically aren’t more so than Google can be.
There is also a button that allows you to “publish” your own information, with a corresponding URL to go with it. You can nestle your new entry into the results you are looking at or have it stand alone. Since this doesn’t end up being published in actual results themselves the utility of this seems limited right now, but there is some potential to make this a bit more Wikipedia like and add social elements.
From a marketing standpoint they have already set up ad space – served by Google’s ad network currently. The rub is that the results are shunted off to the bottom right of the results page, otherwise known as search Siberia.
As for Wolfowitz Arnica… so sorry, Wolfsbane Alpha… this is a return to the natural language debate that continues to come up like a bad burrito in search circles. There’s a school of thought that believe that people would like to ask tourist-like questions of your search engine, rather than the word salad we commonly put into the search box today. However you parse it, the shorter search strings in use now are more efficient to type, assuming you are getting the results you want. Even if you don’t get the results you want, they are easier to reshuffle than re-framing your total line of inquiry. Yet this is another attempt to try out “natural language.”
There’s more to Wolfgang than that however. The creator, Stephen Wolfram claims that his engine will actually compute answers, rather than retrieve them. Anyone who has read the books of Douglas Adams knows where this will inevitable lead (a recap for those who haven’t: a planet sized computer designed to answer the question of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. The answer? As I recall it was 42.)
While it all sounds impressive, I’m going to inch out on a limb and officially label it as a colossal act of whimsy. Which is neat-o, mind you, but no threat to the current order.
In some other parallel universe in which the top 3 search engines were locked in a neck-and-neck struggle for dominance either one of these solutions might have a shot. In our universe, where Google’s dominance over the search engine landscape is only increasing, it simply ain’t gonna happen. Even were they to begin to gain share, the resources of the Googelords are of a depth enough to reverse engineer or simply buy out the offending party.
Next victims, please!
Questions or comments? Feel free to leave them here or check out Reprise Media folks on Twitter.
Topics: Google, SEM: Paid Search, SEO, Search: Innovations, Search: News, Social Media |
From what I’ve read about Wolfram Alpha it seems your cynicism outreaches your explanation, or your understanding maybe. I’m PRETTY sure it’s not intended for tourists…
You are likely correct on all counts… and yet I still think natural language search is barking up the wrong tree. It’s quite possible that what Wolfram is cooking up will be interesting but what I object to is the Google-killing meme. I’ll believe it when I see it - spoken like a true cynic.
[…] was pretty harsh on new search engine Kosmix’s chances at whupping Google’s butt in yesterday’s post, and I don’t take back any of those conclusions even as I have continued to play around with the […]
Hey, we’d love it if we could be your next victim
Duck Duck Go: http://www.duckduckgo.com/. More info about us (and why we think we’re better/different) can be found at: http://www.duckduckgo.com/about.html
Take care,
Gabriel Weinberg
Founder & CEO, Duck Duck Go
Geat and very relevant article. Enjoyed this very much.