Friday, August 21, 2009

New Web Search Engine Review

Internet search overload, a slogan recently used by Microsoft to popularize their new Bing engine, is a phenomenon we can all relate to. Microsoft advertises Bing as the "first ever decision engine." What does Bing actually decide for us? Speaking for myself, I certainly prefer to make my own decisions, don't you? What I think consumers actually want, in order to solve the "search overload" dilemma, is a search-engine that gives us the appropriate information so that we can make our own decisions.

Stephen Wolfram's search engine, Wolfram Alpha, calls itself a computational knowledge engine. This certainly is the case. Far from the run-of-the-mill engines, Wolfram Alpha takes your querie and lists relevant facts, statistics and a unique organizational interpretation of the concept. Wolfram has stated that the goal of Wolfram is to continuously update the collection of the world's knowledge. What is so unique about Wolfram is the content. A search query shows key facts rather than a storehouse of related sites.

It seems as though the Wolfram engine has considered the user's experience through tailoring the search experience to fit consumers of information. This is not the only search engine concerned with the user experience. Yahoo! is also actively concerned with increasing the efficacy of search results in consideration of the human experience. Google became famous for it, Microsoft is now competing using it and Yahoo is quickly closing in on it. But what is it? Bottom line is, consumers want a search experience that gives them the results they are searching for quickly and easily.

1 comment:

  1. I tried playing around with Wolfram Alpha a few weeks ago. Could not understand it. Others say it's revolutionayr. Kind of like the movie District 9. I could only take 20 minutes of it; others said it was epic.

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