• PC World
• »Software
• »Browsers & Add-Ons

What's New in Search

It's hard for many Internet users to remember the pre-Google Web, but there was a time when AltaVista ruled search, and before AltaVista, Magellan was the search service of choice. The history of the Web shows that people will switch to another engine in a heartbeat if it produces more accurate hits on their queries and is easy to use. So search vendors realize they need to be on top of their game. "The amount of competition that's out there right now is benefiting the consumer," says Microsoft Live Search senior product manager Justin Osmer. "We're all trying to come up with the next great thing--the Cool New Thing--so you're seeing a lot of innovation in search."

Much of that innovation centers on how the services display results. Few people use their favorite engine's news, image, and other specialty search tools, even if doing so would mean more accurate results. The trick for vendors, therefore, is to make their search algorithms smarter, giving them the ability to anticipate what the searcher really wants.

If you enter "daffodil" in the Google search box, for example, the results page will display a few photos of daffodils above the Web hits. "What users really want is a picture of those things," says Google software engineer Matt Cutts.

When we tried out the same query in Ask.com, Microsoft Live Search, and Yahoo, none of them displayed an image of the flower in their results. To be fair, we did a similar search using "Eiffel Tower"; this time, Google, Ask.com, and Yahoo displayed at least one photo of the Parisian landmark, but Live Search did not. (Live Search did provide us access to images of the Parisian landmark through a handy 'Eiffel Tower Photos' link in the Related Searches column, though.)

The integration of news stories with Web-search results is a work in progress, with Ask.com leading the way. For instance, when we searched for "titan" and "flash memory" (two separate queries), only Ask.com posted the latest headlines on related topics, including a link to a story on Saturn's moon Titan, and another to a piece on Intel's new flash memory storage--in both cases providing the information we were searching for.

When it comes to movie-related queries, both Google and Yahoo appear to have a slight edge. We searched for "300," looking for information about the Warner Brothers film, which was in theatrical release at the time of our testing. The very first match returned by both Google and Yahoo provided links to the movie's theatrical trailer and reviews, as well as a search box for entering a city or zip code to find local show times.

Microsoft Live Search, in contrast, was incorrect when it attempted to guess our location based on the IP address of the DSL account we used for testing (it was 74 miles off), and it listed movie theaters for Irvine, California, a good 90-minute car trip in Southern California traffic. Ask.com inquired if we meant "300, the movie"; we entered a zip code, clicked the supplied movie link, and received the expected trailer, reviews, and show-time links.

Chart: TV Guides of the Internet

The search services that specialize in finding Web videos weren't able to keep pace with Google's video index. Click the icon below to see how the tested engines performed, including their scores in each round.