In terms of search engines, Google is Old Faithful. Since 1996ish, Google has managed to guide internet users through the interwebs to answer queries and find nuggets of knowledge. While Twitter has been around and fully functional since 2001, it wasn’t until late 2008 going into early 2009 that users and popular internet personalities pointed out the extreme value of the real time twitter search engine. WolframAlpha was released this week to much fanfare and while it is not a search engine in the traditional sense of the word, it is sure to make certain regular queries much easier to answer.
Google. Google has been the go-to search engine for all queries – common, niche specific, or otherwise. Trendwise, Google can expect more of the same. Their large search portfolio including trends, blogs, news, and other content allows Google to maintain their image as the leading search engine in giving their users the best match to their query. Google will continue to be the search leader for queries which can be answered by content, but will presumably lose a fraction of their share to two other companies who have gone where Google has chosen not to. (To say that they have gone where Google can’t would be foolish.)
Twitter. Twitter, with its micro-blog platform, instituted on of the first and most popular instances of real-time search. Twitter search lends itself well to current events queries. In recent times many people have found themselves turning to twitter for the latest news on a popular news event or the latest skinny on a celeb, TV show, or current talk on an issue. Just last night I logged into my feedburner account and noticed that the numbers were a bit suspect. Rather than query it on google, where it could very well still take a few minutes for the latest blog posts on the subject to get indexed and ranked accurately, I turned to twitter. In a matter of seconds I found out that I was just 1 of 10,000’s of people whose feedburner numbers were a bit sketchy.
WolframAlpha. WolframAlpha is heralded by many as a revolutionary new search engine, when in reality they are not a search engine at all. WolframAlpha is self proclaimed “computational knowledge engine”. WolframAlpha comes with a bit of a learning curve that many an internet user will not bother to learn in their lifetime, but for those that do a new world of statistics and learning awaits. While google’s internal calculation mechanisms and stock market analysis tools perform well, WolframAlpha has taken it all to a new level. WolphramAlpha aggregates the statistical result from many different sources called the mathematica to form excellent and complete analysis on a statistical query. The main thing I find myself using WolframAlpha for is to compare stock analysis across multiple companies. I expect WolframAlpha to snag a points of search market share percentage for the mathy and metric driven minds out there.
As you look at the evolution of online search what have you noticed about yourself and your personal search habits?
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