With Microsoft and Twitter launching new search engines later this year should Google, the worlds largest search engine, be worried?
Probably…and they know it.
Speaking at the Zeitgeist Europe 2009 Conference Google co-founder, Larry Page, acknowledged his company’s new competition “people really want to surf [in] real time and they [twitter] have done a really good job about”.
Indeed, in early April the internet (and twitter) was awash with rumours that Google was about to announce it had acquired the micro-blogging site for $250 million.
Twitters ability to search in real-time has proven a powerful draw for users. In an embarrassing case of events for Google their popular Gmail service catastrophically crashed in February this year users turned to Twitter, not Google, for instant updates on the spread of the crash.
When Twitter re-launches its search engine later this year the improved engine will not only index the content of individual tweets as usual but will also index any URL’s they might contain.
With this simply improvement Twitter hopes to become a powerful player in search and, perhaps, finally find a way to earn some money.
Microsoft, of course, is no stranger to search; the companies’ Windows Live search engine was launched in 1998, a year after Google.
Lingering in 3rd place, behind Google and Yahoo, and despite being initially heavily integrated with the Windows operating system Windows Live never generated much of a user-ship.
Microsoft, having failed several times to purchase Yahoo!, plans to launch its’ new search engine “Bing” (or Kumo, it seems that havn’t decided) this week with a $100 million (To place this in context Googles’ spends $25 million on advertising a year) pan-media advertising budget.
At the other end of the spectrum lies Wolfram Alpha, a “computational knowledge engine” developed by British Physicist Stephen Wolfram. Unlike Google Wolfram Alpha uses advanced physics to associate.
While Wolfram Alpha has received much press coverage in the past week its appeal would seem limited; simply search for “bird flu” and the site “isn’t sure what to do with your input.”
Google themselves, however, are finding plenty of things to do with “your input”. In early May the Search Giant (to give them their other title) launched a series of features to their “classic” search.
Although many of these features were available in the search engines “advanced search” Google’s new additions include the ability to search images within a specific site, a “wonder wheel” (basically a fancy way of viewing the ‘similar search’ link found at the bottom of each search entry) and, most notably, a timeline view.
Alone these new search engines might not be a dethrone Google but together they pose a strong threat to their dominance.