Semantic search, the core idea of web 3.0, is all about understanding the searcher and the terms used in order to provide answers, not just results; could Google personalisation, along with other factors, be heralding in this new era of the Internet and search?
The Google algorithm has, for a long time, been dedicated solely to refining the average user’s quality of search results. Of course, the SEO industry has for some time been able to push up websites for appropriate key phrases, using increasingly subtle techniques so as not to upset the algorithm as it becomes less susceptible to ‘gaming’.
Google are now all about quality. They have made it abundantly clear that they want their SERPs to be full of only the most relevant sites that visitors will use, enjoy and revisit; Google are no longer interested in people who invest more time in their SEO than they do in the site or business. As if to prove that along came Vince, followed up by announcements about Caffeine and now personalised search.
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Changes are afoot over at Bing. The world’s third favourite search engine, which is soon to be adopted by Yahoo (the second most popular), have announced a raft of changes designed to improve user satisfaction and develop their burgeoning social media interaction.
The integration of Twitter has been on the cards for some time, even though it was only finally confirmed last month [see: Google and Microsoft Complete Twitter Deal to Herald Real-time Search Era], so this is certainly a major part of the ‘Decision Engine’s’ revamp. Their Facebook tie-in was something of a surprise, arguably even more so the latest announcement also points towards a Wolfram Alpha collaboration.
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Over the past few months I’ve written (exhaustively) about the challenges that search engines face in trying to break the dominance that Google currently holds. MediaWeek have come up with one of the most comprehensive overviews of the runners and riders as well as the difficulties that lay ahead of them.
There are dozens of search engines out there, even social media sites like Twitter are getting in on the act. Yet nobody can get near to ousting Google from the top of the heap. Established names like Microsoft (Bing) and Yahoo have resolved to simply trying to beat one another. New upstarts such as Cuil and Wolfram Alpha have enjoyed initial success, but have failed to convert that into any kind of meaningful long-term joy.
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The much vaunted potential ‘Google Killer’ Wolfram Alpha has finally been launched after a series of false-starts. Pulling in statistical information from all sources as well as providing a little computerised intelligence, it is in truth, quite a departure from the conventional algorithmic based search engine.
With its quick responses to simple questions, generated through a unique ‘computational knowledge engine’, Wolfram Alpha is an entirely new type of resource. You can perform mathematical equations, pluck out information about any date as well as getting all the data on various cities, animals and almost anything else you can muster.
Wolfram Alpha: Making Research and Homework Easier
Having only just released this Beta version, no doubt the Wolfram Alpha engine will develop and become a far more influential utility for researchers on a limited time-frame. At the moment though, I don’t think Google or even Yahoo should be overly concerned by this newcomer.
It is a fantastic source of useful information, but will invariably remain just that, free from the thousands of indexed websites that now clog up various conventional search engines. Perhaps in fact, Wikipedia may be more concerned, with Wolfram Alpha offering a far speedier and more succinct set of statistical results.
If you’ve got a question that you need a quick answer to these days, the first port of call tends to be a search engine such as Google, Ask and Yahoo, or even an online encyclopaedia, say Wikipedia. But is this monopoly about to be gatecrashed by a newcomer?
The current online buzz surrounds the first glimpse of Wolfram Alpha, a uniquely formatted site that looks to answer questions directly. This system will compute what has been asked and provide a formatted answer from its unique computational knowledge engine. This intelligent computer system bypasses all of the traditional keyword associated results to provide a single finite answer.
The new face of online search?
The real question though is whether this can really topple Google’s dominance as the go-to source for so many people? We will of course have to wait and see as Wolfram Alpha is still under wraps with a launch date later in May. In truth though, old habits do tend to die hard, so I’m reasonably convinced the major search engines and their clients won’t be overly concerned by this brand new information resource.
To find out more about Wolfram Alpha, their other innovations – including Mathematica – and the creator Stephen Wolfram, check out their blog here.
