Google has been the crowned king of search for some time now. In some ways, having a 70% to 80% market share has got to go to Google’s head. Having dedicated much time and energy to additions and alterations to it suite of products, some have started asking “what has Google missed?” It’s a question that has led to two new high-profile search products with very different objectives: Microsoft’s Bing and Wolfram Alpha.
In answering this question, we won’t only need to know what Google has done, but also what it plans to do. Luckily there are blogs these days, and in a 2008 post called the “Future of Search” Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of Search Products, discusses, as you may imagine, Google’s perspective on where search is headed. She details out strategies for improving search like making it more mobile, multimedia, personalized, social, all ways to build upon Google’s foundation: the algorithm. It’s a post I’d encourage you to read, if you have a moment.
There is, though, a key problem we see with these search solutions of the future, and it’s a foundational problem. Each of her solutions are based on a mashup mentality, uniting the current results and content with new and interesting types of and ways to search. At the heart, it represents the basic assumption that Google’s algorithm does a good enough job in delivering relevant results.
But it doesn’t. We often find irrelevant results from Google’s. Posts not relevant to what we’re asking, unclear and untrustworthy information, and few options to treat different searches with a different type of output.
What Google Has Missed
This gives us an idea of what Google is missing:
1. An approach to treat different searches in distinct ways. For instance, a search for movie-related information shouldn’t pull or display results in the same way as a search for jet engine-related information.
2. An algorithm that gathers and displays the information that you’re looking for without pointing you to a web page. A key way to speed up the searches that we make is to keep us in familiar format and display only that information that is immediately relevant to our searches.
In come the latest pair of “Google killers.” Wolfram and Microsoft hope to dethrone Google by providing results in a different way, even changing the content that we receive altogether. They’ve begun to notice opportunities in the search marketplace that Google simply isn’t focused on: foundational ones, and they each have their own unique approach to how they’ll exploit them.
Microsoft Bing
Bing’s strength, at it’s core, is Microsoft’s understanding that different kinds of searches require different kinds of answers and interfaces. It treats a search for travel differently than a search for shopping by providing a different set of information and a different type of visualization for each. Google has started down this path with its suite of products meant for specific types of searches, but Microsoft has beaten them to an integrated platform that does the leg work for you.
Wolfram Alpha
Wolfram Alpha takes a different approach. Referring to itself as a “computational engine,” it has a single focus: rather than sending back web pages that may have results of the questions you’re looking for, Wolfram Alpha attempts to give solutions to you directly. Want to compare histories of two stocks? Just ask it. It goes about providing information by collecting and hand-curating info from databases across the web, eventually (read: a few hundred years) uniting all knowledge under a single source.
The Future of Search
Both Bing and Wolfram Alpha have their own set of issues, though. Microsoft uses an algorithm similar to Google’s that is spiced up with better functionality – you still get a lot of results that don’t pretain to what you’re looking for. It won’t take much for Google to catch up to the integration piece and leave out any competitive advantage for Bing – with the exception of their clever distinction between a “decision engine” and a “search engine.” (Future question reminder: how heavily does marketing effect the search business?)
Wolfram has an interesting approach, but its reliance on human input and customization of results might get it moving slower than the world expects. It needs something to streamline the possibilities of customized searches to truly be a reliable “computational engine.” It does, though, seem to have Google temporarily beat in the database game, Google’s comparable product Google Squared has some work to be done.
Hopefully, what all this means is that we’ll start to see some true competition in the search marketplace. Bing and Wolfram Alpha are pushing Google into minor panic mode, which is making them rethink some of those foundational elements in their service. What they seem to remember is that it doesn’t cost much to switch search engines. I’ll often start with Google and if I don’t find what I want fast enough, I’ll search on another engine.
We hope that what we’ll see result is both an exploration in new interfaces from search engines as well as an improved algorithm that helps us find the right results faster. Google’s missing something; it should search for it in Bing and Wolfram Alpha.
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