Competition in the search engine market is heating up. New entries are an excellent development, and one that makes consumers (users) the ultimate winners.
I will not review any of them here, What I will do is just give you a little snippet of each one. My recommendation is that you do visit and try them and find out what they offer.
Here they are in no particular order.
1.- Bing: by Microsoft (Not a search engine, but a decision engine. (Hear that Google?) http://www.bing.com I like Bing, the name is catchy the results are good, the video preview and the interface are cool. Good work Microsoft! Time will tell if it becomes a major contender. It’s too soon to judge.
2.- Collecta (Beta): http://www.collecta.com See this page for a quick explanation of the interface. This is what they call a live (as in happening right now) search engine. Do check it out and comment your experiences. I have found it to be very good so far. For example; a few minutes ago I checked what had happened with the space shuttle Endeavor, and it gave me excellent results.
3. Searchme: http://www.searchme.com The first visual search engine. As described in their “About page”, “Searchme lets you see what you’re searching for. As you start typing, categories appear that relate to your query. Choose a category, and you’ll see pictures of web pages that answer your search. You can review these pages quickly to find just the information you’re looking for, before you click through.” Intrigued?, so was I… Try it out here
4. WolframAlpha.com (not a search engine, but a computational knowledge engine). I think this one is best for scientific and analytic minds. If you want to understand what it offers, a great place to start is Stephen Wolfram Introduction: you should also check out the one page summary, right here: The home page is full of examples; try them and you will get the hang of it.
They are very good at taking suggestions. If you think you can feed it useful and valuable knowledge, use the feedback form in the home page. I did and they listened. While testing WA, I entered the acronym GIGO and it gave me no result. Well, all of us computer people know that stands for Garbage in, Garbage out. I let them know and they included it. Try it!
It is going to take a lot to dethrone Google as the search engine king, but it is surely a lot of fun to see the search engine market segment evolve rapidly, enrich its feature sets and adjust to consumer demands.
Google is obviously taking notice of any development in this area and is evolving with its constant flow of new features and services. The Googlers are relentless, they come up with ideas left and right.
Do you want more fun? then check; Googlelabs
Want to see a cool new feature? Try Google Squared please, note that this is an experimental feature…
more will come on the search engine theme…
