Whew this month was a hell of a ride wasn’t it? I think May is enough to get us all hyped up for the next couple of months. We got an answer engine who looks promising, a “bling” search engine on the way, and a new real-time communication & collaboration product from the Big G!
New Competitors on the Rise
Wolfram Alpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com)
Last May 16th, Wolram Alpha was released. There was so much hype about it becoming the next Google Competitor. It still has some search errors but definitely a promising “answer-engine”. After its release, we’ve seen a mixture of reactions. Before it’s release everybody seemed to have anticipated it to be the next Google contender but unfortunately Wolfram found a niche of its own (or so I think it has). Matt Asay has an interesting say on Wolfram and its architecture of failure. While Rafe Needleman is quite positive that Wolfram Alpha Does What Google Can’t. What’s your take on this people, let me know your judgment.
Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com/)
Santosh Jayaram, Twitter’s Vice-President, has announced that Twitter Search will soon be able to crawl links posted on the site as well as index the content pages which may result to their own ranking system. So real time search plus ranking system will definitely put Twitter Search on a spot against Google (in some way I think).
Microsoft’s New Bing!!! (http://www.bing.com/)
Windows Live Search initially announced that they will be releasing a new search engine under the brand name, Kumo (which in Japanese means “cloud” or “spider”). Last Thursday, Microsoft rebranded to come up with Bing “The First Decision Engine”. It’s not public yet until next month (oh wait its now live hooray!) but the feature video is very promising. CNET News and AdAge have their own reviews. Basing on the video, although Bing’s UI is quite an apple candy, the features are not exactly new in the search engine world.
Other Search Engines on the rise:
- Hakia Beta – http://www.hakia.com/
- SearchMe – http://www.searchme.com/
- Kosmix Beta – http://www.kosmix.com/
- Cuil – http://www.cuil.com/
Google Search Updates
Last May 12, Google announced their new search options.
Significant features include segregation of search results by type (videos, forums, reviews), by date (recent results, past 24 hours, past week, past year), by view (wonder wheel, timeline). Cool ain’t it? Personally loved the wonder wheel feature. (Don’t worry we’ll go through each one of them in the future posts Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
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Last but definitely not the least, in the latest Google I/O, Google featured Wave, the next real-time communication and collaborative tool. If that’s the case, it’ll definitely be a Twitter killer (or so I think again). That depends to what extent this Google product is going to offer to its customers.
I’ll soon be featuring in detail Bing and Google Wave once I’ve personally tested each one of them. It’ll definitely be something to look forward to. In the meantime, if I missed any major update in the web industry for the month of May 2009, please don’t hesitate to mention them on the comments area or drop me a “hey you forgot…” at dave [at] saktoseo.com.
Best of the Web May 2009 is a post from: Small Business SEO Tips – SaktoSEO
