Web Search & Marketing Newsletter - June 2009

Last month also saw the much anticipated launch of Wolfram Alpha, the new “computational knowledge engine”. There were the inevitable comparisons to Google, but the creator of this new search tool - physicist and software entrepreneur Stephen Wolfram – has discouraged these types of comparison as the new website serves a different purpose. Regardless of this, it’s an impressive new resource.

Despite all the press hype, Wolfram Alpha⁸ isn’t a traditional search engine. You can’t use it to find any type of web content online, but instead it can be used whenever you might be looking for a direct answer to a question. Stephen Wolfram has said that the site’s brain is built on content sites like the CIA World Factbook, US Census reports, Wikipedia, and “about nine-tenths of what you’d see on the main shelves of a reference library.”

The Home Page of the site provides example searches that can be done on Wolfram Alpha, plus there is further page of examples⁹ to give users the idea of its strengths. The team behind this search service have done well to collate all the data that it draws upon, but it’s only a small fraction of what’s available on the whole of the web and it may prove to be initially confusing or disappointing to people who are now so used to Google to find information online.

Wolfram Alpha’s main target audience will be mathematicians, engineers, and scientists – as well as students or journalists - because it’s based on Wolfram Mathematica, a software package that can do complex calculations. And being a “computational knowledge engine”, rather than a pure search engine, there are 5 main things that it can do better than traditional search engines, namely performing complex queries; localisation; precision; calculation and comparisons.

This is its main advantage, in that is can make calculations on the fly and present results based on the requested search. It can solve difficult equations and makes decent graphs for lots of specialised enquiries. This can also be its ‘Achilles heel’ however, as it encourages specialised search queries and it takes a bit of practice learning how to phrase queries so the engine understands the input.

Although it’s still early days and will surely improve, it’s currently too picky about syntax and not intuitive to work with. For example, if you enter a query it doesn’t understand, it just returns the text “Wolfram Alpha doesn’t know what to do with your input.”

Therefore despite exhibiting some interesting new technology, Wolfram Alpha isn’t intended to revolutionise search engines. Instead, it aims to add a useful new layer to them, not by trying to beat Google at its own game, but by complementing the traditional search engines and providing an alternative, specialised service to try bridging the gap between search engines and reference libraries.

If you’d like to know more about this new search engine, please contact us for further information.

During May, Google’s search team announced the launch of the new Search Options Panel within Google’s main search results. This gives the searcher the ability to filter, refine and further explore the standard search results to help them find exactly what they need. These options are very useful to ’slice and dice’ the search results for greater focus.

The new search options panel has been launched with limited fanfare and has probably been missed by most Google searchers. It can be accessed by clicking on the “show options” link on the top left hand side of the standard search results and reflects the type of filter options seen in Google News.

The main search tool options now allow users to break the results down into smaller categories of videos, forums or reviews. Other options include looking at results by recency, using a number of different date ranges, or by looking at the images from pages of results. There are also several more in-depth features such as related search, the “timeline” and intriguingly named “wonder wheel”.

The related search option displays other possible search phrases that the user might want to consider and extends the range beyond those now usually displayed at the bottom of a search results page. This function can also be used to check possible search terms for SEO or PPC campaigns, at a very basic level.

The timeline search option enables the selection of a time frame for results so that the chronological order and numbers of documents relating to the search can be viewed. This would be useful to examine the timeline and size of a news article, or how events have proceeded on a particular story. The wonder wheel is an excellent visual map for exploring related topics. It’s also possible to view topics related to the original search not by a visual representation, but by related searches by clicking on the link on the left hand side.

These changes appear well timed by Google to provide more search options in the face of new search engines from Wolfram Alpha (below) and the imminent launch of the new Microsoft search engine - Bing - which we will review next month. It also gives searches new functions to improve the range of results being displayed, although Google should probably do more to raise awareness of this new function. They have apparently put considerable resources into researching eye-tracking and usability studies about how people understand the options in the panel and interact with it, so it is a well-researched, user-friendly method of searching which aims to benefit the user by allowing a much greater level of depth into search results than was previously attainable.

To find out more about the Search Options Panel and how it can help to increase the marketing opportunities for your website on Google’s search results, please contact us now for more information.