The Search Engine Wars
Well, that's too strongly put, but today I've been playing around with Bing.com, Microsoft's newly launched foray into search, and Topsy, a social web powered search.
Bing didn't impress me much; it's not dramatically different from Google, but others have found its results stronger. Wright, my fellow All Tech blogger, points to a self serving example. Bing brings up this blog when you search for "All Tech Considered" while Google only finds the All Tech radio segments.
Michael Arrington, over at TechCrunch, also brings up a very salient point:
Whether Microsoft ultimately succeeds or not in "winning" the search war, the competition is very good for the rest of the Internet. Google needs to be pushed to try innovating new things (not this). And search marketing competition will ensure that Google doesn't get too greedy.
After the jump, we compare them with Topsy...
But, like I said, Google and Bing look at the web in much the same way we have for ages. Topsy, on the other hand, takes a Twitter-age approach to search. What people are currently talking about helps rank the search results.
An example: A search for "abortion" yields a bunch of news items about the shooting death of George Tiller. More interestingly, perhaps, it provided links to The Wichita Eagle, the newspaper closest to where the shooting happened.
Google's first results — and note I wasn't searching on Google News — are from the BBC and a few are about the controversy surrounding President Obama's mid-May visit to Notre Dame. Binging — is that what we'll call it? — "abortion" does yields an AP story about the Wichita shooting.
So, in reality, all three services get you where you want to go.
But what about for something a little more esoteric, like a search for the Large Hadron Collider. Well, Google and Bing get you the wiki page for the "world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator."
But Topsy's first result gets you the answer we are all searching for: "Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet?"