Bing, WolframAlpha, and Google

As an internet user, you're no doubt aware that google dominates the search market. If you have worked in SEO(search engine optimization), website traffic attribution, or web analytics, you may know more about how the search traffic breaks out. (Based on my professional experience, I distinguish google, yahoo, and Microsoft from 'other' search engines. If you'd like more details, comScore's April 2009 Search Engine Rankings is available.)

This week saw a flurry of tech announcements, including a new search engine (Wolfram|Alpha), and an updated/rebranded site (Microsoft's Bing).

First, bing.com, an updated/rebranded release of Microsoft's Live Search. Bing calls itself a 'decision engine', not a 'search engine', but the differences appear subtle to me. As far as I can tell, the launch is largely to get people talking about Microsoft search and to give themselves a cooler name that can be 'verbed up'.

Second, Wolfram|Alpha, a 'computational knowledge engine'. From the FAQ,

It's a computational knowledge engine: it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base, instead of searching the web and returning links.

The code was built with Mathematica and brings back memories of my college computer science classes! Wolfram|Alpha is not a replacement for google (or bing, or yahoo). For certain things, this type of computation makes sense and returns relevant information. For others, it does not even attempt to return results. In fact, Wolfram|Alpha results page offers a 'Search the web' option, which takes you to a google search with your initial search term.

I tried out a couple different types of searches to compare the results.

Search for a city:

• bing - returns the city website, then separate sections for hotels, restaurants, maps, newspapers, and jobs.
  
• google - returns a map and a list of links, including the city website, hotel chains, and a local college.
  
• Wolfram|Alpha - provides population, current time, nearby cities.

Winner: bing, although I can see myself using the 'nearby cities' feature of Wolfram|Alpha.

Search for me:

• bing - I know I'm not a celebrity, but I was disappointed in the results - the first results page includes my grandfather's 2002 obituary and 5 separate entries for my amazon profile.
  
• google - variety of results, mostly what I expected
  
• Wolfram|Alpha - no results

Winner: google (although bing's results may improve as they encounter more of my pages.)

Search for stock symbol, date, etc.:
Winner: Wolfram|Alpha

To my mind, Wolfram|Alpha is a fascinating intellectual achievement, and I will certainly use it for specific types of information. Bing, on the other hand, I found less interesting, and for the bulk of my search I will likely continue to use google.