How Many Search Engines do We Really Need? - The battle grounds are set
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This will surely become the battle of our age. Stage left we have MSN. The Microsoft Corporation has unveiled the full release of its latest and greatest search engine. What MSN has done is turn up the heat on the competition, namely on leading search engine Google. The creators over at MSN finally saw it necessary to offer its users a more “clean” search engine. The developers tweaked the site’s content, eliminating the annoying clutter plaguing its users. What really makes things interesting is that MSN has moved away from a model of just providing search results, but has adopted a more “answer-driven” approach.
Microsoft’s new browser has definite peaks and valleys stemming from their viewpoint of how a true search engine should perform. I must give credit where it’s due: the functionality of allowing its users to be able to get definitions, calculations, geographical and historical information all from within one interface is pure genius. This MSN search has powerful sponsors: mainly those of Microsoft Encarta, Microsoft’s Electronic Encyclopedia and MSN Music Service. Microsoft maintains that it will be able to display results filtered from over eight billion Web documents located in their databases.
My last argument in favor of this new search engine would be that with this newest browser, users will have the ability to create Really Simple Syndication (RSS), which allows users to track search results through an incoming data feed on their home computers. On the minus side, this same magnificent functionality could cause unforeseen issues regarding the security of both the user and MSN…and we all know what Microsoft's security record is like.
In the red corner we have Yahoo, who rolled out their new search engine over a year ago. What Yahoo brought to the table was its own mechanisms for index ranking. Yahoo’s s purpose in introducing this medium to the market was to cast aside its dependence on Google for search results.
Yahoo’s new search engine has given the Internet community a well organized search page with integrated tabs directing their users to listings, news, images as well as any yellow pages that may be available. Although both Yahoo and Google use similar algorithms to return relevant search results, Yahoo offers a number of advantages over Google. Yahoo incorporates a link to any cached copies of indexed pages so as to limit the amount of time spent by their users, while its news search is powered in part by its own editorial and technological resources.
Although Yahoo has made impressive strides to separate itself from the rest of the pack, the issue that will always cast it into shadows of peril is its lack or originality. What the principals over at Yahoo need to realize is that, in order to be the best, you have to be original. I would love to see something radical from Yahoo, and not just something based on someone else’s hard work and design.
Rounding out the bottom two competitors of the field, let me introduce to you Ask Jeeves and Amazon (with its A9 engine). With the latest features of both Ask Jeeves and A9, both search engines are boasting that they have a more user-friendly interface. Although both companies approach the search engine world from different perspectives, both have made small but significant evolutionary steps in this search engine battle of the giants.
The advantages of both these distinctly different approaches of how to disseminate information to the viewing public are simply put by stating that the next generation of search engines isn’t going to be about who can build the bigger and better index, instead it will be about finding new ways to personalize search results, as well as inventing ways to modify the way in which those results are presented.
I can honestly say that many of the other search engines make strong arguments as to why the browsing public needs a variety of search engines. However, as an avid Google search engine user, in my opinion they still have some way to go before they can beat the giant.
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