Search Engine Wars

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A few weeks back, the internet was abuzz discussing the potential of Wolfram|Alpha. Other than a great opportunity for those of us who are not Unix programmers to locate the | (pipe) key, Wolfram|Alpha, being a "computational knowledge engine", was supposed to present information in a unique and more useful format that Google. Fascinating. So fascinating that they even discussed Wolfram|Alpha's potential on Talk of the Nation Science Friday.

Last night, I was treated to a commercial for Microsoft's new search engine Bing. Like Wolfram|Alpha, Bing is not really a search engine at all, but rather a "decision engine", whatever the hell that means. Apparently it means the term "search engine" is out of vogue with Google's competitors.

Gentle readers, I know you are all wondering how these new search contraptions stack up against Google's search. Based on my very scientific testing this morning I can tell you that Wolfram|Alpha and Bing are both crap. By that I mean that neither will link you to Grown Ass People. Wolfram|Alpha, in its defense wasn't designed to handle such queries and suggests looking in the "people" or "earth sciences" section. Bing, links to a MySpace page and to some other web pages that have linked to us. Mostly, though Bing just produces links to crap that is even less relevant than GAP, and that's really saying something.

In all seriousness though, when looking at the queries that Wolfram|Alpha was actually designed to handle, the results it produces look a lot like boring Wikipedia entries but without the typos. And Bing? Well, sometimes I just get the feeling like Microsoft is just trying to hard. I mean who spends $ 100 million to advertise the launch of their new search engine?