Monday, March 28, 2005
Search Engines Battle for Web Clickers
Google has so firmly staked out its place as the Internet search-engine leader that it has even earned a place as a verb in the English lexicon. Paradoxically, because of its popularity, there may be no better time to try something different. Google's success has forced competitors like Yahoo, MSN Search and Ask Jeeves to hustle with releasing new product features, search controls and improved behind-the-scenes programming. The resulting bonanza of tools brings more search capabilities, presented more intuitively than the Web has ever seen.
Competing Services: But despite the advances, it may be users' search habits that present the biggest obstacle to improving the search experience. The pressure to produce is not just coming from Google. In April 2003, Ask Jeeves added "Smart Search" to its engine, which tops search results for definitive queries like "Who is George Washington?" with answers like an encyclopedia citation and a photograph in addition to Web links. That same month, Yahoo provided shortcuts to its own topic pages on popular subjects. The top result for "weather in New York," for instance, leads to Yahoo's New York City weather page, with current conditions and a five-day outlook.
Associating database content with queries caught on. America Online Search now provides information from partners' content and its own; these "snapshots" in fields like entertainment, sports and shopping link to information from publications within the Time Warner media universe, including Entertainment Weekly and Sports Illustrated. Likewise, MSN Search returns links to information from its own specialized databases, like MSN Music, msnbc.com and Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia.
News Features: "Having the trusted data, what we know is a right answer, and not asking them to trawl around that's a huge advantage for the user," said Ramez Naam, MSN Search's group program manager. Ask Jeeves will introduce technology this spring that will further the question-and-answer abilities of its engine. The new feature, Direct Answers From Search, will search across the entire Web, rather than simply from its own database, to find answers to natural-language queries (that is, those phrased as questions rather than mere search terms).
"This allows us to answer far more questions than would be possible using editors or structured databases," said Jim Lanzone, the company's senior vice president for search properties. "When you're diving into structured databases, you're limited in your coverage. We want to harvest the power of the 2.5 billion English-language documents in our index, to more broadly answer people's keywords and questions."
In comparison, natural-language queries performed with other engines not matching specialized content yield a list of links closely associated with the phrase with more consideration for popularity than accuracy. For example, searching for "Who invented the Internet?" on Google, Yahoo and MSN yields a top result exonerating Al Gore, rather than crediting computer scientists like J.C.R. Licklider. Other Google rivals are focusing their product enhancements on offerings that try to bring simplicity and relevance to the search experience.
Making It Easier: Microsoft's updated MSN Search tries to make searching easier by complementing Boolean terms like "and," "or" and "not" with slide controls (under "results ranking" in Search Builder) that can be adjusted to determine how broadly or narrowly to search. In addition, a "NearMe" button can return results based on proximity to your location; the company says about a quarter of all searches make reference to geographic information. "You're going to see a lot of work in that area," said Oshoma Momoh, the general manager for program management at MSN Search. "If you're querying a news item, we'll show it to you. Or answers from real people. If we can guess that a person is shopping, maybe we can give you a few simple tools that might help you with that task, rather than guessing, 'Do I click on this?'"
Also of recent note, Amazon's (Nasdaq: AMZN) A9 search engine builds on the ability to search by supplementing Web data with its own information. For example, the A9 Yellow Pages service, introduced in late January, not only searches for and provides directions to local businesses, but with the "Block View" feature actually displays a photo of the business in the context of its neighborhood, with millions of images up and down the streets of a dozen cities including New York, Atlanta, San Francisco and Seattle. "This is more than the hidden Web. It didn't even exist before," A9's chief executive, Udi Manber, said.
New Technologies: Google itself, of course, has been a major innovator, with features like Google Video, which provides searchable transcripts to television programs, and Google Maps, which offers the kind of dynamic, easily navigable charts once reserved for dedicated map programs.
John Battelle, who maintains a Web log about search technology (Searchblog), said innovations like "Block View" showed how dynamically the search companies were taking advantage of new technologies and new economies. "In 1997 you would have had to spend tens of billions, and it wouldn't have made any sense," Battelle said. "Now, you can strap a camera and GPS on a computer and drive down the street taking pictures. It's a neat idea, and it didn't cost the farm to try. Now imagine that across the whole Web that's what's happening."
More information at Guardian eCommerce.
Competing Services: But despite the advances, it may be users' search habits that present the biggest obstacle to improving the search experience. The pressure to produce is not just coming from Google. In April 2003, Ask Jeeves added "Smart Search" to its engine, which tops search results for definitive queries like "Who is George Washington?" with answers like an encyclopedia citation and a photograph in addition to Web links. That same month, Yahoo provided shortcuts to its own topic pages on popular subjects. The top result for "weather in New York," for instance, leads to Yahoo's New York City weather page, with current conditions and a five-day outlook.
Associating database content with queries caught on. America Online Search now provides information from partners' content and its own; these "snapshots" in fields like entertainment, sports and shopping link to information from publications within the Time Warner media universe, including Entertainment Weekly and Sports Illustrated. Likewise, MSN Search returns links to information from its own specialized databases, like MSN Music, msnbc.com and Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia.
News Features: "Having the trusted data, what we know is a right answer, and not asking them to trawl around that's a huge advantage for the user," said Ramez Naam, MSN Search's group program manager. Ask Jeeves will introduce technology this spring that will further the question-and-answer abilities of its engine. The new feature, Direct Answers From Search, will search across the entire Web, rather than simply from its own database, to find answers to natural-language queries (that is, those phrased as questions rather than mere search terms).
"This allows us to answer far more questions than would be possible using editors or structured databases," said Jim Lanzone, the company's senior vice president for search properties. "When you're diving into structured databases, you're limited in your coverage. We want to harvest the power of the 2.5 billion English-language documents in our index, to more broadly answer people's keywords and questions."
In comparison, natural-language queries performed with other engines not matching specialized content yield a list of links closely associated with the phrase with more consideration for popularity than accuracy. For example, searching for "Who invented the Internet?" on Google, Yahoo and MSN yields a top result exonerating Al Gore, rather than crediting computer scientists like J.C.R. Licklider. Other Google rivals are focusing their product enhancements on offerings that try to bring simplicity and relevance to the search experience.
Making It Easier: Microsoft's updated MSN Search tries to make searching easier by complementing Boolean terms like "and," "or" and "not" with slide controls (under "results ranking" in Search Builder) that can be adjusted to determine how broadly or narrowly to search. In addition, a "NearMe" button can return results based on proximity to your location; the company says about a quarter of all searches make reference to geographic information. "You're going to see a lot of work in that area," said Oshoma Momoh, the general manager for program management at MSN Search. "If you're querying a news item, we'll show it to you. Or answers from real people. If we can guess that a person is shopping, maybe we can give you a few simple tools that might help you with that task, rather than guessing, 'Do I click on this?'"
Also of recent note, Amazon's (Nasdaq: AMZN) A9 search engine builds on the ability to search by supplementing Web data with its own information. For example, the A9 Yellow Pages service, introduced in late January, not only searches for and provides directions to local businesses, but with the "Block View" feature actually displays a photo of the business in the context of its neighborhood, with millions of images up and down the streets of a dozen cities including New York, Atlanta, San Francisco and Seattle. "This is more than the hidden Web. It didn't even exist before," A9's chief executive, Udi Manber, said.
New Technologies: Google itself, of course, has been a major innovator, with features like Google Video, which provides searchable transcripts to television programs, and Google Maps, which offers the kind of dynamic, easily navigable charts once reserved for dedicated map programs.
John Battelle, who maintains a Web log about search technology (Searchblog), said innovations like "Block View" showed how dynamically the search companies were taking advantage of new technologies and new economies. "In 1997 you would have had to spend tens of billions, and it wouldn't have made any sense," Battelle said. "Now, you can strap a camera and GPS on a computer and drive down the street taking pictures. It's a neat idea, and it didn't cost the farm to try. Now imagine that across the whole Web that's what's happening."
More information at Guardian eCommerce.
