Anyone remember that search engine that launched a few months ago? …I think it was called Cuil, Kwel, kowel or something. Anyway, if memory severs it had the usual 2 things that gave it all the hype to be the next big search engine to “approach Google status”.

  1. Former Google peeps behind the project
  2. Media buzz that promised this one was is different & going to compete for search market share.

Fast Forward 6 months and now we have WolframAlpha.com and Bing.com.

So What makes these engines different?

Wolfram Alpha

This engine launched a few days ago with the 2 “hype criteria” mentioned above. I read in an article a few weeks ago that one of the Google founders used to intern at Wolfram. Don’t quote me on this, but it was something to that effect.Wolfram’s claim to uniqueness is its ability to quickly gather new data and present it on a results page.

In comparison – Google may index pages quickly, but only a few select news outlets are authoritative enough to rank immediately for popular search phrases.

Like most people, I don’t think we need Google serving up recent tweets in SERP’s just because it’s fresh content. However, many agree Google could go further with Universal Search in certain verticals. One example is with sports. In the image below I compare the search result for “Kansas City Royals” between Google and Wolfram Alpha:

google-vs-wolfram-alpha

Google-vs-Wolfram-Alpha

With Google I get the previous and next game data – which is great, but with Wolfram I get the entire American League Central standings.

Like any new search engine, Wolfram Alpha has a few issues to work out, but performs well in its infancy. Its strengths are weather, sports, math, and demographic data for a location.  If you have not tried it out yet I encourage everyone to try it out once.

Bing.com

Bing is not live yet, but promise to be the next best source for travel, shopping, dining. Their claim is “the world doesn’t need just another search engine, it needs a decision maker“. From the promotional video I can’t get a true handle on how well it’s going to perform. We all know MSN wants to make a bigger splash in the search market. They are not winning the traditional battle with MSN.com or LIVE & buying Yahoo may not be the answer either.

Takeaways:

The main buzz right now surrounding most of search is how are search engines going to incorporate the rapidly expanding web on thier SERP’s. These new engines are taking a stab at Google dominance by trying to be more “in the moment”. Social Media, and sites like twitter are popular and speak more to what is happening currently. If these engines can take that idea and translate search into a better shopping experience, better weather data, sports update, etc more power to them.

Immediate relevancy vs authority will be a struggle forever and I think users will find that one engine may not be best at all things.

Will these two new engines be short lived or still around next year? If history tells us anything they have a short window to prove themselves worthy or the masses will move on.