New Search Efforts from the "Big" Guys

A great little article in WSJ ("In Search of...Better Ways to Search," Vascellaro, Jan 17 2007) has turned me on to some intriguing new search efforts from the "masters" of search at Google, Yahoo, and Ask!

Google's new effort is called searchmash - the key here seems to be integrated search, you get everything on a single page including the usual text results plus images, videos, blog results, and most are viewable right from the search page.

Yahoo is using recently (ok, not so...) acquired AlltheWeb and AltaVista to test out various search technologies it probably does not want to run the risk of putting out on the major branded search page just yet. Both include interesting audio search capabilities that are worth playing around with.

The former "Ask Jeeves," now just Ask! is fooling around with some new technologies as well on Ask X. Is "Ask" a strange word, or is it just me?

Jimbo Wales, one of the folks behind Wikipedia, has embarked on search.wiki.com, which is touted as a "wiki inspired search engine" (...I'm not sure I know what that means yet...) - this is a freshman effort that you can join and help create, in an open source fashion.

Leave it to Microshloft to do something strange - If you can't join them, beat them?? Take a gander at Ms. Dewey...uh, Bill, this baby ain't going nowhere fast...

With a WSJ Online subscription, you can read the whole thing here.

Rage on.