There is a lot going on right now in the world of Search.  There are many new services popping up all the time, that strive to make search better, faster, smarter and more relevant to the individual through personalization.  We’ve all heard of the next “Google-Killer” that never quite seems to get going.  Most recently start-ups like Cuil and Wikia created a buzz, but failed to live up to the hype.  Meanwhile Google still has over 63% of the search market share, and doesn’t look like it is going anywhere.

Google is able to maintain it’s supremacy at least partly through constant innovation.  At this years Searchology event at Google headquarters in Mountain View, four major new Google products were unveiled.

1. Rich Snippets:  These are search results that return metadata from web pages, with extra information like address or calendar information, and semantic mark-ups, that allow the search engine to better understand the actual meaning of the content.
2. Google Squared:  Described as “transformative”, this product will take a text statement, like “sports car”, that is typed into the search box, and return a table with photos of sports cars, their manufacturers, countries of origin, and other relevant information.  What it is actually doing is looking for cues that imply that “something is something” and supplies corroborating evidence to that effect.
3. Google Search Options:  Allows you to manipulate and filter search results, and drill down to find the kind of results you were looking for, like forum posts, blogs, images or product reviews.
4. Skymap:  This app for the Android operating system for mobiles takes a users GPS coordinates and based on where they are standing and what direction they are facing, will overlay a star map to show users the constellations they are facing.

These first two examples are ways that Google is trying to help create the semantic web.  Google is very much aware that the race is on for a true semantic web.  Co-founder Sergey Brin recently wrote about it on Google’s blog:

"Perfect search requires human-level artificial intelligence, which many of us believe is still quite distant. However, I think it will soon be possible to have a search engine that 'understands' more of the queries and documents than we do today."

Not  everyone trying to create a real semantic web is trying to be a “Google-Killer”.  Most new search products are looking to be niche players in ways that complement Google.  Take Twitter Search for example.  One of the primary reasons that it has been so successful is that it searches the site’s micro-blog posts in real time, as opposed to Google which searches very recent indexes that are not actually done in live time.  Facebook and FriendFeed are doing similar real-time search, but again these are only on their own social networks.  Social site Twine is starting to incorporate information about it’s users into it’s search results, and will rank results by personal relevance. New addition Scoopler is trying to aggregate data from many sites and offer real-time search, but it’s still early days.

The one that has everybody talking right now is Wolfram Alpha.  Alpha will launch this Monday, May 18th, and has been in very limited beta for some time.  Technically Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine, but is really more of a giant calculator, or a “computational knowledge engine” that attempts to understand meaning. Essentially Alpha is a giant data store that understands and responds to language the same way that a person would.  This has long been the holy grail of search, and Wolfram Alpha is still not 100% there, but what is does accomplish is that it helps computers understand the data that they are processing.  This is the promise of the Semantic Web.  Confused yet?

Let me use some examples to show you what Wolfram Alpha can actually do:

1. Just like on Google, if you typed `How far is it to the moon?” you would get the correct answer.  But one of the coolest things about Wolfram Alpha is that it is able to answer questions that have never even been asked before, and work out these responses on the fly.  You could ask it to compare the TransCanada Highway to the Nile river, and it would understand that you wanted to compare the length of these two otherwise unrelated things, and would give you the answer.
2. If you asked it to compare Microsoft Commerce Server versus IBM Websphere, it would return stock prices for Microsoft and IBM, as well as financial, and some product information as well.
3. If you asked it about “internet use in Africa”, it would come back and tell you that there are 51 million internet users in Africa, complete with charts of use by country and other relevant information.
4. If you asked it what the weather was like on the day of your birth, in Botswana, it would come back with the answer.
5. If you wanted to know how wine exports in Italy were doing compared with their French counterparts, the answer would include specifics in litres of wine exported, kinds of wines, percentages of GDP, and many other economic indicators.
6. If you typed in “O Canada”, you would get the history of the Canadian national anthem, and it would play the song for you.

Here are a few examples of what this actually looks like taken from PC World’s website:

Goog Intc

Declaration of Independence War of 1812

mary, tiffany

Some critics are saying that they are not smart enough to understand the responses, and others are saying that it lends itself very well to mathematical and statistical analysis, and is not ideal in other scenarios.  Beta testers have pointed out that it has nearly no knowledge of popular culture.  A query on “50 Cent” came back with a jumbled mess of currency and rap references.  Founder Stephen Wolfram suggests that it will take up to 1000 permanent curators, who are experts that will vet the data sets used by Alpha, to keep all of the information current.  This is a big difference from Google, which uses statistical analysis to determine if a result is what you were looking for, and as everyone knows, this often results in wrong hits.

Wolfram Alpha may still have growing pains as the curators figure out the best approaches, and in the meantime you are bound to hear a lot of phrases like “evolutionary leap”, “an invention that could change the internet for ever”, or “could be as important as Google”.  Time will tell if Alpha will be able to capitalize on the advancements they’ve made, but even if they don’t Wolfram Alpha is a big step in the right direction for the semantic web.

What the experts are saying:

"Compute whatever can be computed around the world."  Stephen Wolfram, Wolframalpha.com

"For those of us tired of hundreds of pages of results that do not really have a lot to do with what we are trying to find out, Wolfram Alpha may be what we have been waiting for."  Michael W Jones, Tech.blorge.com

"If it is not gobbled up by one of the industry superpowers, his company may well grow to become one of them in a small number of years, with most of us setting our default browser to be Wolfram Alpha."  Doug Lenat, Semanticuniverse.com

"It's like plugging into an electric brain. It provides extremely impressive and thorough questions asked in many different ways, and it computes answers – it doesn't merely look them up in a big database."  Nova Spivack, Twine

"This is like a Holy Grail... the ability to look inside data sources that can't easily be crawled and provide answers from them."  Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of searchengineland.com

Other Resources:

• Wolfram Alpha
• Wolfram Alpha Blog
• Wolfram alpha’s Wikipedia entry
• CNN - New search engines aspire to supplement Google
• Guardian - Wolfram "Could Rival Google"
• Guardian - Wolfram Alpha shows itself in public
• Guardian – A Sneak Preview of Wolfram Alpha
• PC World – I am not Smart Enough for Wolfram Alpha
• PC World story – Wolfram Alpha will take Your Questions any Question
• Independent – An Invention that Could Change the Internet for Ever
• BBC – Web Tool “As Important as Google”
• BBC – Searching for Another Google
• Semantic Universe Blog – I Was Positively Impressed by Wolfram Alpha
• Read Write Web – Wolfram Alpha Our First Impressions