Search is alive and kicking

In the last couple of months we have seen many completely new initiatives.

Are we now out of the crisis? I say, YES we are!

1. Microsoft Bing, a serious new competitor in the arena. In my opinion Bing is moving in a direction of more focused search. There are some ideas inspired by Vivisimo, Seachme , and my old Snaket for the categories. Some other ideas taken from the Ask3D interface. A much better ranking, and more important a new way of accessing and organizing search results. It seems that Microsoft wants to invest more money in search and is a very good news for the whole sector. I will follow their performance in the next months.
   
2. Wolfram Alpha, is something very different and also very difficult to evaluate. They aims at having all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. A very ambitious goal. For this reason they have my full respect. They provide amazing results for some queries and very poor results for other queries. Precision is very high, recall is low. I will observe their performance more and more in the next months.
3. Many proposals for RealTime Search with players such as Twitter Search, OneRiot, FriendFeed, and the many others. This is where freshness is important.
   

Having different search options is an absolute need for a truly open access to the information. Information belongs to people, and search engines are the gateway to it. Therefore is very good to say that Search is alive and kicking.