Search is back in the news again. Long dominated by Google (and for now, still dominated by Google), some new tools are emerging. Microsoft is throwing a lot of ad dollars into Bing, which to me is Google with random header photos. Yawn. Meanwhile, Wolfram Alpha is fascinating, even to a mathematics noob like me.
Earlier today, with a few clicks, I learned that in 2008, one in every 414 babies was named Brian and that the name was most popular in the early 70s. (Thanks, Wolfie!)
It’s the next iteration of search — not just keywords, but keywords in context (or tasks combined with keywords to produce context). Instead of a search engine just returning someone else’s information, hopefully ranked in a way that puts the most useful stuff first, the new search guesses your intent and tries to provide what you need — answers, maps, formulas, analysis. The trick, of course, is that guessing my intent must be automated, and the programming for that is immense.
At the same time, I just started using a new (experimental) Firefox extension, Ubiquity. When invoked, it adds an overlay to Firefox that can be made to do tasks, like map an address, email a snippet of a page, check the weather, etc. You type a command or command shortcut and results appear as you type.
So, thanks to Ubiqiuty, I can say that the number of words in this post so far is: 239. And I could Twitter on it (if it weren’t so long). Or email it through a Gmail account. Or translate it to Russian.
There’s a lot of room for improvement in these tools, but I’m very interested in the direction all this is going.
