Ok, so as an assignment I did a Google’s image search on “Adam Fuller” and this is what I found…

Guess I am a baseball player. Who knew?

It seems like these days competitors to Google are coming out of the woodwork. Awhile back, I introduced Powerset, who is now a property of Microsoft. Powerset is bringing back the concept of synaptic search, while a new search engine, Viewzi is focusing on a different concept. Viewzi brings search to a new light with different views.

While Powerset and Viewzi are good search alternatives to Google, so is Ask, Live search, Yahoo! and AltaVista… The one who I think may ultimately pose a threat to the Google giant is a new search called Cuil (pronounced cool). Cuil boasts a page index in the billions while Google is in the millions. This may just be hot air; however, Cuil searches by page contextual relevance. While Powerset is searching page synaptics, and Google is searching keywords, Cuil is searching the page content. What makes this so different from Google is page rank. Think of those days back in gym class, it was a popularity contest when it came to choosing teams. This is similar to how Google ranks its pages, the more links, the more popular, the higher in the search results.

Cuil has it easer than PowerSet. Synaptic search is a complicated task, while searching the contents of the page are much easer. The other Thing that makes Cuil a viable alternative to Google is who developed it, Tom Costello, a Stanford professor and Anna Patterson, Google’s search developer. The one thing that I want to know, is why hasn’t anyone come up with a good alternative sooner?

With the failure of the Yahoo acquisition, Microsoft is at it again. This time they managed to biy the search engine Powerset for $100 million. I introduced Powerset several weeks ago as a possible future competitor to Google (Is Google in trouble?). With the power of Microsoft backing them, Google may very well have a run for their money. Google on the other hand scuffed the idea of semantic search, saying that there was no future for it. I still believe that a natural language semantic search is the way of the future. Only the future will tell.

Back in March, Google completed its acquisition of DoubleClick. What dose this mean for us? I do not think this is good for consumers. The holy grail of the internet age is user-targeted ads, so why would this be bad you may ask? Simple, our privacy is out the window, not only will Google see what we are searching for, and what our interests are; they will also see pages we go to outside of Google. Many web sites have advertising that is provided by DoubleClick (Banner Ad’s). Google can see what users all over the world are going to on the web, even if you do not use them to search. If you ask me this is scary and dangerous behavior for one company to be doing! Can you day monopoly!?

Update: Google has just lunched the worlds most powerful commercially owned satellite, now not only do they know what we see on the web, they can see us anywhere we go off the web!

There is a new search engine out there, which if it gets big could spell trouble for Google. Powerset is a “natural language” search engine, which means it knows the meaning of a page (in a way), so you can search in the form of a question. While search engines such as Ask clime to do this, they actually index pages by key words. If you were to ask the question, “What is Henry the 8th’s birthday?” Google would search for the key words Henry and birthday. Powerset on the other hand, knows that you want to know the birthday of Henry the 8th and displays a quick answer. Another great feature of Powerset is that it displays the resulting search page from within there search engine. What this does is give them control of more feature such as an outline of the contents of the page. In side-by-side comparisons of Powerset and Google, Powerset has a slight lead. There is a down side to Powerset, it is in testing, and only searches Wikipedia. Therefore, if you are doing a research project and are using the internet, Powerset may be the way to go. I hope this “natural language” idea catches on and Google adapts it. It could only make surfing the internet that much easier! For more check out powerset’s website.