Will Microsoft devour Yahoo! and challenge the unstoppable Google?

In the world of search, Google has a 65% share of US traffic, Yahoo! with 19.5% and Microsoft trailing behind with only 8% (Guardian). The figures speak for themselves – so how can Microsoft hope to challenge the mighty Google in search?

Re-launching its search with the new Bing engine, designed to rival Google, does not seem to have done the trick, but perhaps that’s not what it was meant to do…

Maybe it was conceived to send other search companies a message.

Only a month after its launch we saw it taking some of the Yahoo! market share (Bloomberg). And it’s no coincidence that this week we see renewed talks between Microsoft and Yahoo! If talks succeed then maybe the resulting search engine can claw back market some of the market share.

Search companies make their money through advertising dollars and so far Bing hasn’t raised Microsoft’s search advertising revenue. In fact, it remains static at the 6% share it controlled before the launch (Eweek). That said, if Microsoft was to gain just one percent of the search share from Google, it would cost Google $220 million in revenue.

Rumour has it that Microsoft is about to announce poor fourth fiscal quarter results, following a drop in sales of personal computers bundled with its technology. Over the past fifteen years Windows operating systems have been the only option for many of us and now Google are starting to challenge that domination with its open source operating system Google Chrome OS.

It’s hardly surprising that Microsoft wants to regain some advertising revenue from Google but will it consume Yahoo! in the process? We’ll have to wait and see.

The science of search: has the Bing revolution begun?

It appears that Microsoft’s newly launched ‘decision engine’ Bing has generated some great interest with an ever increasing number of web users trying it out. Yesterday Microsoft released its own data on the state of Bing just one month after its official launch. It makes for interesting reading…

According to Microsoft’s own data, Bing has seen an 8% growth in unique users to bing.com in its debut month and based on their own polling Microsoft has also seen an increase in the number of people ‘likely to recommend’ Bing to their friends or colleagues.

With its appealing design, easy navigation and claims to be able to deliver more relevant results than its competitors, Bing is certainly creating waves. However, while Bing appears to be making strong in-roads into enhancing the search experience in the US, here in the UK the current Beta version doesn’t enjoy many of the tools that enhance the US search results.

While it is strong on image results – I personally love how you can search by image type – it needs more work to be a real competitor to Google right now. Although this looks set to change, in a recent article featured in MediaWeek Microsoft UK's head of search, Paul Stoddart commented: "We want to make sure Bing in Britain is the best Bing in Britain we could possibly have." One to watch it seems…

While Bing in the UK continues to develop its search capabilities, real time search is evolving rapidly. The uniqueness is its immediacy. Micro blogging sites such as Twitter are fast becoming the buzz in the world of search. Even Bing has begun to include certain key Twitter feeds into its search results. Like wise, following its recent re-design and the introduction of real-time search, FriendFeed now updates continuously as data comes in. You can search for anything on the site and see it instantly. Real-time search is also possible for advanced search options, including search terms that you can save and track through FriendFeed, and on its blog widget.

The significance of real time search is the possibilities it presents. The lack of delay between composition and publication of information means information hungry audiences are provided with up to the minute results which are more relevant than those provided by more traditional search engines such as Google.

In my opinion these are exciting times for the world of search. Competition is healthy, new entrants to the search market will result in new innovations and help regulate the bigger players.

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WolframAlpha - backing up the facts

I really love this idea. The concept of cramming all the knowledge you can into one place and making it accessible to the world is so bold and so ambitious that you have to admire the guys at WolframAlpha for trying to pull it off.

"WolframAlpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything."

Now that's an formidable goal!

As you can see, WolframAlpha aims to be more than just a search engine. You can ask it about essentially any kind of systemic factual knowledge. In much the same way as some search engines work (Ask Jeeves), you can ask WolframAlpha specific questions such as: “why does a camel have two humps.” But that is where the similarities end. Instead of searching the web and returning links, WolframAlpha performs computations on its own internal database, using software programmes, and returns answers based on its findings.

Some of the data in that knowledge base is derived from public or private websites, but most of it comes from systemic primary sources. As you can imagine, this is a massive job and it is neverending....which is why if you ask the question “why does a camel have two humps" - it won't be able to answer you, at least not just yet.

As the project progresses more information will be available whilst the Wolfram team work through all the content areas covered by reference libraries, handbooks, and much more.

With so much work involved, (WolframAlpha is currently 5 million lines of symbolic Mathematica code together with many terabytes of data), it might be a while until we see the final release. But if the first version is an indication of things to come we can expect a lot more from Dr Wolfram's team in the future.

If you want to follow its progress you can track the teams latest news through the Wolfram blog and community area of the website.