Searching for search and finding Godot

The battle for search eyeballs is heating up again. The model has been shown to work and Google is now Ad Mogul extraordinaire. Microsoft in classic fashion has tried, learned and is trying again. Yahoo has had much publicized struggles. Even new players are coming into the space. The buzz about Wolfram Alpha is everywhere.

What this next level of competition is about is relevance of information. The reason Google initially made inroads with search was their optimization routines and ability to give people search results that were relevant to what they wanted. Recent additions such as the ability to promote and bury links based on your own preference are continued iterations of this optimization. Similarly iGoogle and personalized history of search with functions like returning the link you clicked on last time you searched for something are again continued iterations.

The next generation of search is taking more of that sea of information that is out there and turning it into something useful. This is both good and bad. It's good/great in terms of making things digestible and understandable, especially when you are researching a particular topic. But it is less so when what is important is being determined for you and you loose some of the outliers. Outliers are where innovation happens. This is not to say that results don't get buried with a raw information return because they certainly do but just as with code and layers of abstraction, with great power comes great responsibility and the need to know what is going on behind the scenes. In many cases this behind the scenes is proprietary information and algorithms that companies (rightly) don't want to share as their secret sauce. What a dilemma.

Wolfram Alpha is the new kid on the block and have gotten a lot of Internet love with an effective launch that you could watch in video live. It's cool for checking out what happened on the day you were born, doing research on specific items and generally getting a quick easy view of relevant data to concrete topics.

Microsoft Live didn't really live up to what was desired by Microsoft but they are back and ready for round two with their new search engine Bing. (I thought that was the sound the Southwest ads used for new deals?) Bing is in pre-launch and is supposed to do a lot of what Wolfram does and use other proprietary correlation tools to give better and deeper results. ComputerWorld has a nice Visual Tour of the functionality to give a good idea of what is coming.

That leaves Google. Google's new exciting new news is the pre-pumping of Google Wave. If buzz on the Internet is any indicator there is a lot of excitement and potential here as well. If it wasn't clear why there was rumored interest in Twitter from Google it is now. Wave is intended to be a merge of... well... everything Just In Time.

So, it looks like the observation that the next generation of systems are about visualization and the presentation of information, not just finding it. Boy won't this be fun to watch.