Is a 'Google killer' on the horizon?
Industry leaders to little-known contenders are trying to develop easier ways for Web users to find what they're looking for.
By Gregory M. Lamb | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the February 28, 2007 edition
Page 1 of 2
The future of online searches may involve faster and greater computing power. Or maybe it will include clever new algorithms that would let people type in specific questions, asking for what they want. Or maybe it will add people-power to the equation, letting the masses express their human intelligence to augment computer programs.
Actually, all of these approaches are being tried, from search leader Google to a slew of little-known contenders with names such as quintura, clusty, hakia, cRANKy, and kartOO.
That's because while the Internet's content grows all the time, it's only useful if you can find what you're looking for. Google made its reputation by performing searches better than anyone else, and it now has the deep pockets, impressive talent pool, and market domination to defend its position. People used Google for nearly half (47.5 percent) of their Internet searches in January, according to comScore Networks, which measures Web activity. The company's closest competitors – Yahoo (28.1 percent) and Microsoft (msn.com, with 10.6 percent) – trail by a wide margin.
But some say Google's position isn't unassailable. "I don't think Google is on any safe ground," says Philipp Lenssen, who founded and edits Google Blogoscoped (blog.outer-court.com), a Google-watching website, from his home base in Stuttgart, Germany. Don't forget what happened to AltaVista, Mr. Lenssen says. A leading search engine in the mid-1990s, it was surpassed by Google's new algorithms, which were based in part on the value of links between sites to produce better search results.
If a competitor could develop a system that truly understood ordinary human language – responding accurately to a request such as "I want to find the best pizza place in my area that's open on Sunday evening" – that would be a huge improvement over keyword searches, he says.
But to understand "natural language," computers must be equipped with artificial intelligence (AI). One of Google's top priorities is to be the leader in AI, according to an internal Google document leaked to Lenssen last year. Speaking to a group of scientists in San Francisco earlier this month, Google cofounder Larry Page said, "My prediction is that when AI happens, it's going to be a lot of computation and not so much ... clever algorithms [as] brute computing power." And AI may be coming soon, he adds. "I don't think it's [as] far off as people think."
Powerset Inc., a San Francisco-based start-up, is going the "clever algorithm" route, using natural-language technology developed at the Palo Alto (Calif.) Research Center. "In technology, there are incremental changes, and there are breakthroughs," said Powerset investor Charles Moldow when the collaboration between Powerset and PARC was announced early this month. "We expect Powerset to fundamentally alter how people interact with their computing devices."
RSS feed
