MSN Live Search , Yahoo Search, and Ask Jeeves are more akin to a search engine. You go and search for something and the varied results of that something from in and around the internet are displayed for your viewing perusing. Many of the search results are displayed via their overall popularity in the search engine itself and advertisement revenues.
Google is more of a data search and aggregation system. Google software spider-bots scour and search the web for all sorts of data. You then type in what you're searching for and Google displays the results of your query based on the spider-bot's searching, the amount of times someone has searched for a similar query and clicked on a resulting web page, and of course advertising.
Regardless of what search engine you are using, once the results are displayed, you then have to do some further searching for that piece of information you're looking for. Sure, if you're searching for information on Chrysler, you get a results page that will display a link to realtime and past stock information, a link to the wikipedia page, some news search aggregation results, a map location of the company's headquarters, and the company's home page. Sure, the data's all there, but all over the place. You end up clicking here, there, and everywhere to get the nugget(s) that you want or need.
But what if you need something else? This morning I wanted to find out what the background music was that was playing in the latest Terminator: Salvation trailer that I saw last night during the season finale of 24. So I used to Google to search for 'Terminator Salvation trailer music'. The first few result pages were forum posts. SO I perused those pages and discovered that the song is NIN's The Day the World Went Away, but not quite. I had to do a bit more digging, and discovered that its a mix called 'The Green Mix' in the trailer. Well, not quite yet again. It is the green mix in the trailer with added drum acoustics. After finally digging a bit deeper, I found that someone had taken the 'Green Mix' and resampled it with the drum beats and had it up on YouTube.
Whew, talk about digging deep! But, I've searched for more arcane things over the years via a combination of Google, MSN Live Search, and Yahoo and found my answers as I've developed quite a skill at searching online for the data and info I need and want and in a certain form too.
But that in and of itself is the inherent problem. The data out and about the world wide web is all over the place.
And then I tried Wolfram Alpha with emphasis on the 'Alpha' part as its still not 100% cooked and still being baked and worked on. I tried searching for Terminator Salvation trailer music, and received the Wolfram/Alpha doesn't know what to do with your data error message. Wolfram doesn't operate like a traditional search engine. I typed in Terminator Salvation and received a rather well organized page of information about the movie; director, cast, release date , and a small plot synopsis. More then likely all culled from IMDB and then displayed via Wolfram's format.
Add in a bit more information like small versions of the trailer, information about the trailer (music played, composer, etc.), links to a few photos and who in them, the photographer that took them, the location (geo tagging), and all the little odds and ends information that I scoured a bunch of forum boards for.
I searched for Uranus and received all sorts of realtime information about the planet as well some info about the discoverer. A Voyager 2 query resulted in a bunch of realtime data about the spacecraft as well.
Wolfram Alpha is not going to change the way we search so much as it's going to change the way data is compiled and displayed.
