Are Bing and WolframAlpha catching up with Google in search engine battle?

Share

The front of the pack isn't always the best place to be. In a panel of search engine representatives at the Munich DLD conference, Google's Ben Gomes was the most reluctant to give anything away. Alsio on the panel were Conrad Wolfram, of WolframAlpha, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, the architect of Microsoft Visual Earth, and Ilya Segalovich, of Yandex – Russia's largest search engine.

Questions from the panel host, Jochen Wegner, the editor of Focus Online, kept on coming. Is it possible to compete with Google in non-English-speaking markets – as the successful Yandex does? "We have done very respectably in almost all markets we are in," was Gomes's answer. Is Google failing in giving the right answers, especially when a topic becomes very popular? "We have recently launched 500 changes. Overall, search gets better day after day after day." Are you reacting to Bing? "I don't believe we are reacting to Bing in any way. We are really focused on the user."

There is no doubting that Google is still top dog among search engines. However, the spontaneous applause of an impressed audience here at DLD wasn't for Google, but for WolframAlpha and Bing.

WolframAlpha's approach to making the world's knowledge computable clearly found fans, and showed that the search engine market is less and less about search, but more and more about giving answers and providing decisions, as Wegner put it.

WolframAlpha can tell you the weather on the day David Cameron was born. "Everything I show you with Wolfram Alpha is done in the cloud and sent back live," explained Wolfram. Yes, WolframAlpha is not a search engine anymore. It is a knowledge engine which provides you with possible answers.

If you type in "Microsoft v Google", you will get the latest trading information as well as the fundamental statistics and finances. If you type in "egg and bacon" you will be told how much running you have to do today to get rid of the calories you just ate.

"WolframAlpha is about high power computation and knowledge that meet at an exciting time when computation gets democratised," explains Wolfram.

Bing also has a new search approach, trying to organise the search results in a different way – and Bing continues to grow its market share. In fact, it is becoming an incredible user-oriented search engine – which made a deal with Wolfram Alpha last year to provide search results in select areas across nutrition, health and advanced mathematics.

Microsoft's search engines results rely more and more on structural data – a term that Aguera y Arcas is fond of using.

In addition, there is the new map project which Aguera y Arcas presented to a stunned audience. Its three-dimensional view of New York shows clearly that Bing Maps will provide stern competition for Google maps. It is built in Microsoft Silverlight, and provides an amazing real view of the streets.

"We envision space as a canvas;" says Aguera y Arcas. His team is building different features for the map. Recently for example, they came up with a geolocation of the front pages of all the world newspapers. The new beta mapping site was just launched.

The clash of the search engines has definitely started.