To Bing or Not to…………..

One of my old students called me few days before and asked me about my views on “Bing”. Initially I was not able to understand what he was speaking about. He has a misconception that I get frequent updates on emerging technologies and standards. I asked him what that “Bing” actually means. Most of the teachers learn from their students, and I am no exception to this.

The much hyped Bing is out and people have started comparing it with google. Google has become a benchmark while talking about search engines! We can’t ignore this search giant. The effectiveness and functionality of any search engine can be analyzed only be matching it with Google. With the new “Bing” and its old “Live”, what’s the position of Microsoft as far as search engine market is concerned?

The comparisons are quite interesting to read and all of them are addressing issues such as the interface and quality of the results. The focus of contemporary Web information retrieval systems has been to provide efficient support for the querying and retrieval of relevant documents.

As far as relevance is concerned, I have had some interesting experiences when I used Google. I tried to know about my favorite actor “Asin” few years ago (she had no website then and was not so popular too), I got very interesting results. Some of them were official web sites of some movies she acted/acting and many were mathematical web sites with formulas such as asin(x) (complementary function of sin(x)), acos(x)… kind. My friend had a similar experience while using the search term “Anna” (Aringar Anna) and found many websites related to Anna University and Anna Kournikova.

Just as the ranking of documents is a critical component of today's search engines, the ranking of complex relationships will be an important component in tomorrows analytical search engines. Analyzing the keywords without understating their meaning is an age old technique and Google too has moved to semantic searches. Google executives over the years have acknowledged that semantic search technology will be an important component of search engines in the future. All of a sudden you can’t make a smart search engine and the process is quite tough as the underlying html docs are also to be enhanced with Meta data. I came to know that Google’s Innovation labs are doing plenty of research in making it “Semantic-Google” and in January of this year, during Google's fourth-quarter earnings conference call, CEO Eric Schmidt touched briefly on this topic, hinting that the company is getting more serious about semantic search technology.

Will Bing be just a mere search engine to compete with the likes of Google and Yahoo or is it going to address any of the complexities of Information Retrieval? I don’t know whether Bing is just an enhancement of “Live” or with their acquisitions such as Powerset and FAST, they too are in the process of enriching the user’s search experience with more meaningful results.

In terms of User Interface, the best one as far as I am concerned is “Cuil”. There's another one called "Blackle", an energy saving search engine developed to promote the green computing movement.
There are several search engines that are much better than Google if we are very much particular about the ranking and relevance. Try WolframAlpha, a systematic knowledge “computational” search engine, if you want real results to your queries rather than wadding through pages and pages of “possible” and “similar” answers of Google. WolframAlpha is not a conventional search engine. It uses Knowledge models to bring you the right answer. I think WolframAlpha and Google can co-exist and offer different search flavors. Only this May it became live and I suggest the readers of this blog too have a try at it.