Google has turned into a household verb, but that doesn't make it the last word in Web search.
On one level, it can't be: Web searching isn't even 15 years old, and there's no reason to think that somebody couldn't do it better than Google.
On another level, it shouldn't be: The technology used to figure out what pages people want to see also helps companies calculate what products people might want to buy, and therefore what ads to display for them. Do you really want one company controlling that show?
Nobody's going to win any market share from Google -- about 50 percent of the U.S. market for Web search, twice that of No. 2 Yahoo, according to ComScore's latest data -- on pity alone. Other companies will have to win customers by offering something better, and probably less advertising than Google pushes at you.
A test of three other major Web search sites -- Yahoo, Microsoft's Live Search and IAC's Ask.com -- showed that they can, but it's not easy.
The best opportunity for the competition is probably blog searching. Google runs one of the biggest blog services around, Blogger, but using it to find relevant postings can quickly get you lost among "blogspam," or fake sites set up only to advertise unrelated products or services. This gets especially bad if you use Google's "sort by date" option to find newer posts.
Ask's blog search often did better. For example, a search for blogs talking about the possibility of the Metro rail system tunneling through Tysons Corner yielded about the same number of results at both Google and Ask, but Google's list of recent items was dominated by ad-filled phony sites.
Another blog-search site, Technorati, also provided more relevant links than Google. Yahoo and Live don't provide blog-only search.
Another Google weakness could be in video and photo results, some of which were far off the mark compared with the findings of other sites.
On the design side, some of Google's competitors also offer novel and interesting ways to get to the data you want.
Live's online maps also often prove more useful than Google's, which are deservedly renowned. In addition to the satellite photography available at every mapping site, Live also provides aerial photos in and around many cities. They're taken from a much lower altitude than photos available elsewhere and show the sides of buildings, not just their roofs.
One of Yahoo's best features isn't on its home page: a bookmark-sharing site called del.icio.us that it bought in 2005. Since it lists only sites that people have bothered to save shortcuts to, a search there can produce far less fluff.
All that said, for most of the things we search for on the Web every day, it may not matter which search engine you use. In most of the dozens of searches I tried for such things as the schedule of the Screen on the Green outdoor movies on the National Mall and Jim Romenesko's widely read blog about the news media, all four sites yielded the Web pages I sought.
They all also provided such conveniences as cached copies of pages that I could bring up if Web sites were inoperative or overloaded, and links to limit searches to images or news stories.
Google functioned better with more esoteric topics, finding the little-trafficked Web site of an Arlington neighborhood and an obscure battery-testing program. Ask delivered the least relevant results in these tests, with Yahoo and Live's accuracy falling in the middle.
Google also excelled at finding recent news stories. On Monday afternoon, it found a story about the reversal of a patent-lawsuit ruling against Microsoft within minutes of the decision. At Ask, Yahoo and Live, the same query yielded only older, less relevant stories (in Ask's case, none newer than July 30).
All of the sites tended to be too eager to interpret search queries as sales opportunities. Looking for reviews of a new HDTV, for example, yielded only links to sites selling that set-- not any third-party reviews. A search on how to wash an autographed baseball jersey led only to sites selling -- you guessed it -- autographed baseball jerseys.
Just as e-mail services can have a hard time fending off spam, it seems that search engines struggle to tell when a user doesn't want to turn into a buyer immediately.
If one of Google's rivals can crack that problem before the market leader, then you might see the Web-search market get a lot more interesting.
Ask, which redid its site this summer, is the most creative. It uses a clean, clever two-column layout that keeps your search query and related links visible on the left at all times, instead of having them scroll out of view. It also provides thumbnail previews of many sites it indexes, accessible by clicking on a binoculars icon.
The best feature at Microsoft's Live search, also recently redesigned, is its "search macros." The customizable queries limit a search to a set of sites that use particular terms. One of them, for example, looks for recipes posted at five popular cooking sites.
Source:www.washingtonpost.com
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