I’ve been looking at another of what seems to be an endless flow of new search engines. The newer ones seems to be taking more of an aim at the Ask market - encouraging direct questions rather than the traditional search that link off to other websites.

Hunch seems to be an interesting one that claims to learn from your searches and asks a few questions up front to get to know you. As it’s supposed to help you make decisions I thought I’d test it out on a highly important subject - what type of beer should I drink? Hunch asked me a few questions to refine my search and returned exactly the right result for my taste Stout (or to be more precise Guinness). Not a new technology maybe but quite a nice implementation.

When am I ever going to use this? Probably never again I just don’t use this type of engine, same opinion I had for Wolfram Alpha. Another touted “Google-killer” which wasn’t quite on the right lines. I just don’t seem to search for a question I need a direct answer for - is it just my search style?

It seems Microsoft have come up with an idea that they hope might help them close some ground on Google on search share.

Obviously this isn’t going to happen overnight but if they can implement a system that returns better quality or is less corrupable than Google PageRank then at least they stand a better chance at attracting new users. We do of course have to bare in mind that the lead is currently huge and Google doesn’t stand still so I’d definitely stop short of saying this was a Google killer.

So what’s this fuss about then? Well Google’s success is built on PageRank- essentially a measure of website popularity by incoming links to a website. This popularity when coupled with relevancy can give a good indication of the importance of a website and therefore help rank it accurately. Now it isn’t quite that simple anymore - Google have added much to their algorithm to avoid easy interference by people trying to manipulate the index e.g. using link farms.

Microsoft are touting a system called BrowseRank which effectively takes a user’s browsing habits into account when working out importance. In other words the websites you visit regularly, the time you send on the site etc.

This is great from the perspective of search results and a hell of a lot more difficult to manipulate than current algorithms. Perhaps search engine optimisation would be come just that “optimisation” or maybe some companies would spend money on overall online marketing rather than just spending huge amounts of their budget just on SEO.

Who knows where we will be in a few years time but it’s the first real search idea I’ve seen come out from Microsoft that I’ve thought has real potential. I’m uneasy at Google’s current dominance in the search market and hope that the market becomes more open in the future (Microsoft or any other company).